UCCA Clay presents “Hidden Within Matter: Zhou Xiaohu & Zhang Yibei” from April 3 to June 21, 2026, bringing together brand-new UCCA-commissioned pieces alongside other recent work from both artists. Through installation, sculpture, animation, and other media, Zhou and Zhang explore the latent agency within material itself. Taking “the object” as its point of departure, the exhibition examines the operative role of materials across history, perception, and everyday life, and considers how it continually reconfigures the boundaries between nature and technology, the artificial and the ecological.
YIXING, China—From April 3 to June 21, 2026, UCCA Clay presents “Hidden Within Matter: Zhou Xiaohu & Zhang Yibei.” The exhibition features a series of newly commissioned works and other recent creations from the two artists, foregrounding the agency inherent to matter through multimedia practices such as installation, sculpture, animation, and archival studies. Inviting the audience to move beyond a traditional human-centric viewpoint, the exhibition posits “things” as narrators capable of expressing and conveying information. It reconsiders how objects participate in shaping our cognition, history, and daily lives through their material presence, while continuously blurring and reconfiguring the boundaries between the natural and the urban, the artificial and the ecological. This exhibition is curated by Yao Mengxi.
The title “Hidden Within Matter” unfolds along two intertwined dimensions. On one hand, matter itself contains information—inscriptions sedimented over the processes of formation, circulation, and persistent existence, rather than bestowed by human language. These traces serve not only as witnesses to history, but also as active agents in its making. On the other hand, matter is intrinsically capable of expressing and creating; rather than inert vessels awaiting interpretation, materials continuously interact with the world through their inherent properties, subtly permeating, interweaving with, and reshaping the boundaries often taken for granted. Through distinct artistic trajectories, Zhou Xiaohu (b. 1960, Changzhou) and Zhang Yibei (b. 1992, Daqing) each respond to these propositions, prompting viewers to re-examine both past and present from the perspective of “things,” and to attend to the active role material takes within social, economic, and ecological contexts.
In Gallery 2, Zhang Yibei presents “Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds.” In this project, she turns her attention to the present moment through the lens of “phenology” (the study of cycles in nature), examining the entanglement and co-existence of nature and the artificial, life and technology, material and perception. The UCCA-commissioned Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds (2026) takes a cell phone tower disguised as a tree as its central element. Incorporating cast aluminum, marble and found objects into its spatial structure, the work constructs a perceptual field that audiences are free to ramble. Research into phenology brought the artist profound revelations—just as seasonality and climate shape the cycles of flowers blooming and animal migration, the multi-layered networks connecting the environment and living things similarly condition how the world is perceived.
Although the work’s title evokes a natural soundscape of waterflows and birdsongs, it is actually silent. This deliberate quietness, along with the marble-carved seeds and internal organs, serve to activate the viewer’s own sensory awareness, directing their attention toward the invisible network of phenology formed by otherwise imperceptible circulations of matter and exchanges of information—including mobile coverage, wind, seeds, and the coordinated workings of internal organs. Visitors are invited to wander through the installation as if they themselves were sensing devices: if we remain open to all signals, what might we hear? Referencing the framework proposed by Donna Haraway, we may see ourselves as part of a knotted-together network of “sympoiesis” (making-with). In a state of quite observation, we can reflect on how the artificial intertwines with the natural, how technology becomes internalized as part of life, and how matter quietly records stories of coexistence between humans and the natural world.
As fragments of shipwrecked ceramics enter into quiet resonance with cell phone towers camouflaged as trees, a dual narrative of matter unfolds within the exhibition space. These materials are at once sediments of history and traces of the present—tracing the trajectories of civilizational exchange while simultaneously weaving networks of coexistence between life and technology. Through the respective practices of Zhou Xiaohu and Zhang Yibei, “Hidden Within Matter” offers a profound examination of the manifold agency of material across temporalities and conditions—between past and present, nature and technology, life and environment. In doing so, the exhibition expands the possibilities of matter as a narrative agent, prompting a deeper reflection on materiality, perception, and the “sympoietic” orders of existence.
