2026 Art Basel Paris: Zhang Yibei
BANK is pleased to present Zhang Yibei’s solo project When the Hungry Body Calls for Freedom—What Does It Want? at Art Basel Paris 2026, Booth 1.M56. Zhang’s practice has long centered on the relationships between material, body, and perception. This presentation takes “hunger” as a lens, beginning with the body’s most immediate sensation and extending it toward more complex psychological and collective dimensions. In the environment the artist has created, each work can be seen as a “hungry body.” Seeds, everyday food and household objects, and carnivorous plants appear as improvised imagery, pointing to a bodily feeling that is difficult to articulate yet persistently present.
For Zhang Yibei, hunger is first a bodily experience: a physical emptiness in the stomach, the body‘s most direct craving for food, and the instinctual drive that follows. But even after the body is fed, another kind of hunger may remain. It comes from parts of personal experience that were never answered, from the feelings of lack, anxiety, and unworthiness formed while growing up—uncomfortable emotional habits that linger. Those deficiencies, which may seem to belong to the past, return at certain moments, prompting the urge to compensate and fill them again. This sensation, once distilled, ultimately opens onto a collective unconscious: a sense of lack that circulates across generations and communities, never fully resolved. The artist understands this as a dynamic spiral that cannot truly end. We keep trying to fill the gap, only to realize it will not disappear. Instead, it becomes a kind of eternal hunger.
The freedom in the title, then, does not mean finally achieving wholeness. It means actively embracing a self that carries a gap. Seeds contain both hunger and the potential for growth. Food and household objects can temporarily satisfy bodily needs, but never once and for all. Carnivorous plants evolved their predatory nature out of scarcity—a hungry body that eventually grows organs to devour the other. It is another solution born from desire and survival. The artist uses sandstone, glass, and bronze together. Sandstone, as a kind of “solid sand,” sits between strength and fragility. This fluid state echoes the dynamic hunger at the heart of the concept and resonates with the idea of turning inward and accepting. Desire, lack, and survival are all part of lived experience. Each of us may live with some longing that can never be completely filled, and it is precisely in that unfilled space that imagination may emerge.
Zhang Yibei was born in Daqing in 1992 and currently lives and works in Beijing. She holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Sculpture from the University of the Arts London. Recent solo projects include Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds, UCCA Clay, Jiangsu (2026); Please No Helmet, Longlati, Shanghai (2024); Sophia, Gallery Weekend Beijing (2023); and A Vase in Everything, BANK, Shanghai (2021). Recent group exhibitions include the First Songshan Lake Biennale, Guangdong (2025); *Keeping Online: Art and China after 2008*, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2025); and Jing’an International Sculpture Project, Shanghai (2024). Her work is held in the collections of M+, Hong Kong; Song Art Museum; Longlati Foundation; Beiqiu Museum of Art; and the Tanoto Art Foundation, among others.
