Yihao Zhang’s artworks move through series of repetitions and reach outward, probing, adjusting, and testing the space around them, exploring the ways we survive and search for ourselves in unfamiliar places. One piece rotates upward whilst apparently drilling into the ground. “It exists within a system that values adaptability, so it never really arrives. It is always readjusting, always in process,” Zhang says. Another reaches outward with tentacle-like extensions and swaying arrow forms. “For me, this speaks to the survival strategies we learn when we move through unfamiliar cultures and social structures: we extend ourselves, probe our surroundings, test boundaries and attempt to locate a sense of self.”
The work begins in his own psychological state. His studio is an archive of components: “Things I have taken apart myself, second-hand car parts, pieces of furniture and different types of motors.” He “physically talks” to the materials, combining, testing, recombining them with motors, shaping paths of movement, watching how each part resists or responds. Sometimes the trial and error phase lasts a week or longer. Only then does he build the main structure, welding and finalising the motor system.
Zhang is originally from China. He trained first at a film academy there, then studied at the Royal College of Art in London. Growing up queer in China, he said, “I learnt how to behave, how to blend in, how to survive in a context where being fully oneself was rarely possible.” That experience informs the movement in his machines. “Their repetitive and restricted movements mirror my own experience of seeking self-recognition within systems that do not easily offer space for you to exist.”
He works mostly with welding and reconfiguring motors. Sometimes he uses programming or motion capture software to refine the trajectories. Smaller works can take a month from concept to completion. Larger ones take two to three months, sometimes longer, especially if the engineering or testing is intricate.
When I ask how he wants people to feel about his work, Zhang admits that he’s torn. “My installations often appear dangerous or unsettling, so some viewers feel a sense of threat and keep their distance. At the same time, there is sometimes a subtle humour in them.” He doesn’t aim for a single response. “I am more interested in provoking a response, whether that is tension, discomfort, recognition or a quiet emotional shift. Every person brings their own history to the work, so the emotional reading is deliberately open.”
His influences are both theoretical and practical. Michel Foucault and other philosophers inform his thinking about power, bodies, and structures. He’s also inspired by the artist duo Lolo & Sosaku. “Their commitment to the raw qualities of material and motors, and the way they choreograph those elements, has had a strong impact on my approach.”
Zhang’s work can be situated within a lineage of kinetic and process-based practices that prioritise movement as a mode of thinking, resonating with the self-destructive machines of Jean Tinguely, the cybernetic experiments of Gordon Pask, and the embodied, performative investigations of Rebecca Horn and Stelarc, where motion becomes a way of negotiating relationships between bodies, systems, and space.
Performance is part of his practice too. Sometimes he performs himself, but more often he collaborates with other performers. “Live performance becomes a kind of theatre between the work and the audience. It is more immediate and more dramatic,” he said. “The installations already contain a performative core; the machines are engaged in endless acts. Bringing live bodies into that environment allows the emotional undercurrent of the machinery to surface more clearly. For viewers, the performance can make the internal tension, vulnerability or aggression within the mechanical structure more legible, almost as if the machines and performers are sharing one extended nervous system.” When activated by or alongside human presence, the installations take on a heightened sense of tension, as if the boundaries between organic and mechanical systems begin to blur.
By refusing resolution and embracing continuous adjustment, Zhang’s work reflects a world in which stability is provisional and identity remains in flux.
Words by Emily Burke
