New Value Institute

About

New Value Institute is a practice-based research institute and artistic intelligence framework initiated by Jingyi Wang. It investigates how societies recognise, negotiate, judge, and organise forms of value that cannot be adequately represented by a single measure.

Across artistic, social, technological, economic, and ecological contexts, NVI approaches value as relational, situated, and institutionally produced. It studies how these relations become perceptible, consequential, and legitimate, and how particular structures might be experimentally reorganised.

NVI originated in Jingyi Wang’s artistic practice, which forms the institute’s founding research corpus. Its purpose is broader: to create a shared research environment in which artistic and interdisciplinary practices can investigate how value is produced, judged, exchanged, internalised, and institutionalised.

NVI originated in a specific artistic practice and is developing into a shared research environment open to other practices, disciplines, communities, technologies, and institutional contexts.

Founding Corpus

Post Capitalistic Auction
JUDGE ME
Voice to Voice

Expanding Research Architecture

Collaborative practices
Collaborative inquiries
Comparative cases
Protocol hypotheses
Institutional test environments

Background

NVI begins from artistic practice because artworks can do more than represent systems. They can construct conditions with real roles, rules, choices, relations, and consequences. In these conditions, value can be acted upon, articulated, negotiated, judged, exchanged, or withheld.

Such conditions can bring people, institutions, technologies, resources, commitments, conflicts, and forms of attention into new relations. Through the actions that follow, otherwise diffuse or internalised value structures may become perceptible.

NVI studies these practices through labs, writings, archives, and collaborations. Its research asks what structural relations become perceptible, which elements depend on the artistic context, and whether any relation can responsibly be developed into a mechanism or protocol hypothesis.

Statement

NVI treats value as a central public question in societies increasingly organised by computation, automation, ecological constraint, and institutional distrust.

Value is shaped by systems of measurement, exchange, judgment, governance, legitimacy, attention, care, computation, and utility. These systems decide what counts, who is heard, what is rewarded, what is excluded, what can be converted, and what remains outside existing forms of recognition.

These systems make selected dimensions of value legible, comparable, transferable, and actionable. In doing so, they may obscure what cannot be computed, converted, or made commensurable. They intensify a deeper question: how can institutions make decisions where the values at stake remain plural, partly incommensurable, and resistant to complete calculation?

At NVI, artistic intelligence is understood as the capacity to construct conditions in which latent relations become perceptible through situated action. These conditions may take the form of artworks, performances, public situations, listening structures, or other forms of artistic inquiry.

Within these situations, value can be encountered and acted upon without first being reduced to a price, score, ranking, KPI, token, or algorithmic objective.

Its purpose is to investigate existing value systems, develop language and methods for understanding their limits, and prototype alternative ways of organising judgment, commitment, negotiation, and institutional responsibility.

At its core, NVI asks what is allowed to count, who has the authority to judge, how legitimacy is produced, and how institutions might hold plural forms of value without forcing them into a single measure.

About the Founder

New Value Institute was initiated by Jingyi Wang, an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who has developed her artistic practice since 2014. Born in Beijing, she has long lived and worked between Norway and China. Her practice constructs artistic conditions through which systems of value, judgment, exchange, labour, legitimacy, and self-worth can be enacted and examined.

Her education and professional background in communication, media, advertising, and performing arts shaped her attention to how value is framed, circulated, recognised, and legitimised in public life. Her recent research increasingly engages institutional design, complex systems, artificial intelligence, and the ways computational systems formalise value.

Wang holds a B.A. in Advertising from Peking University, an M.A. in Global Communication from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and an Erasmus Mundus Master in Performing Arts jointly delivered by Université libre de Bruxelles, the University of Copenhagen, and Université de Nice.

She serves on the editorial board of TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation.

Her projects have received long-term support from Arts Council Norway.

Her works have been presented at Bergen Kunsthall, BIT Teatergarasjen / Meteor Festival, Black Box teater, TPAM Yokohama, Harbourfront Centre Toronto, Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival at Hong Kong City Hall, Kunsthall 3.14, Studio USF, and Penghao Theatre.

Her work has been featured in Nikkei, Norsk Shakespearetidsskrift, South China Morning Post, and The Mainichi.

Across auctions, trials, interviews, listening environments, living systems, and AI-mediated conditions, she reorganises social forms so that relations of value can become perceptible through public action and encounter.

Wang’s practice provided the initial questions, cases, and methodological foundations from which NVI emerged. As the institute develops, this founding corpus becomes one source within a wider collaborative research environment open to other practices, disciplines, communities, and institutional contexts.