Yarina Dai - China - Global Creative Graduate Showcase
Yarina Dai
Designer biography:
Yarina Dai is a contemporary jewelry artist based in Shanghai, China. With a background in Jewelry + Metalsmithing (Rhode Island School of Design MFA 2024, Rochester Institute of Technology BFA 2022). Through speculative design, Yarina Dai creates a futuristic vision that blends nature and technology with the human body, employing innovative processes that mix the digital and physical spaces, such as 3D printing, electroforming, and AI filmmaking, her work addressing themes of reliance, addiction, mental health, and the ethics of artificial intervention in natural evolution.
Collection concept:
In my practice, I explore how human desires to manipulate and anthropomorphize nature through technology—especially bioengineering—shape our empathy, fears, and dependencies. Inspired by visits to labs like MIT Media Lab and Tufts Silklab, I speculate on the ethics of altering life’s building blocks. My futuristic world in 2300 features Naturify, a biotech company creating living jewelry, revealing both the healing and dangerous sides of innovation. By blending reality and speculation, I question how far we should go in reshaping evolution and call for a balance between reverence for nature and technological advancement.
