The Paradoxical Presentation of the Uncanny : The Path of ‘Failure’ as a Dialectical Method in Conceptual Art Practice

Han, Zhi and Gere, Charlie and Quin, James (2026) The Paradoxical Presentation of the Uncanny : The Path of ‘Failure’ as a Dialectical Method in Conceptual Art Practice. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This practice-based research and this thesis aims to explore and validate a practical method that evokes the uncanny in the ontological sense in the practice of conceptual art. Much prior visual-art practice on the uncanny has largely remained at the level of affect and phenomenal appearance. While such work has substantially expanded the presentation of the uncanny feeling beyond linguistic structures, it has still fallen short of giving adequate form to the ontological conception of the uncanny or uncanniness. In many cases, practices centered on the uncanny have relied on horror, eeriness, or alienated appearances at the level of the work’s surface in order to agitate the “familiar/strange” binary within the cognitive structure. By contrast, this thesis defines the uncanny as the collapse of the grounds of judgment and the instability of the subject-position, rather than as an object-level effect of defamiliarization. Based on Heidegger and Lacan’s ontological positioning on related issues, the study contends that the oscillation presented by the work should be situated “between both familiar and unfamiliar / neither familiar nor unfamiliar,” that is, compared with the uncertainty in the cognitive content in past practices, this study contends that the occurrence of the uncanny depends on creating the uncertainty of the cognitive structure. Accordingly, the research utilizes “failure” as the internal driving force of negative practice (rather than as an unsuccessful outcome) to construct a pathway of conceptual representation that leads toward the uncanny, and ultimately proposes a creative strategy centered on a double-structural paradoxical propositional model. Methodologically, given the project’s parallel development of theory and practice, the study adopts an iterative cycle of “theoretical reflection — practical verification — theoretical critique — re-making” to enact a dialectic research method of know-that, know-how, and know-what. Within several case studies, paradoxical propositions are designed and tested, and a set of operational evaluation indicators is proposed.