Zhang Yibei: “Things” Are Both Witnesses to History and Capable of “Expression”
Author / Wang Kaimei
Originally published on ARTing 2026.5.21
Exhibition Review:
Zhou Xiaohu’s “Panoramic Stage” VS Zhang Yibei’s “Improvised Performance”
In 2026, the world still finds itself confronted with war, pandemic, climate change, trade barriers, and the divisions brought about by populism. What, then, might be capable of mending such a fractured landscape?
Artistic inquiries into the origins of human civilization may still offer one possible remedy.
The exhibition Hidden Within Matter: Zhou Xiaohu & Zhang Yibei at UCCA Clay Museum is one such compelling example.
In Chinese cultural memory, the histories carried by Yixing, much like those of Jingdezhen, inevitably evoke a history of East-West exchange and trade rooted in raw materials. In the case of Jingdezhen, that material is porcelain; in Yixing, it is the famous zisha teapot. In the exchanges between East and West, forms of understanding dispersed in intercultural spaces of civilizational encounter, marked by the misunderstandings and distortions of their time, have converged into the broader current of China’s entanglement with the world. This process of convergence has never been one-directional, but rather a reciprocal flow of exchange, perhaps one of the earliest messages transmitted by the “pre-globalization” that began with Marco Polo.
In April, I traveled to Yixing, Jiangsu, to see Hidden Within Matter: Zhou Xiaohu & Zhang Yibei at UCCA Clay Museum. Standing before the museum, one can immediately sense the ambition of architect Kengo Kuma, who selected locally hand-fired ceramic tiles for the building’s façade. Their naturally shifting zisha kiln tones stand between earth and sky with both splendor and calm.
At UCCA Clay Museum in Yixing, two artists from different generations — Zhou Xiaohu (born in Changzhou in 1960) and Zhang Yibei (born in Daqing in 1992) — are brought together under the central thread of “Hidden Within Matter.” Curator Yao Mengxi explains that the exhibition title contains two layers of meaning: the information embedded in matter as a witness to history, and the information expressed by matter through its own capacity for expression and creation. Under this title, Zhou Xiaohu’s exhibition Anchor of Asia | Shipwrecked Porcelain and Ballast Stones occupies the first floor of the museum, while the second floor presents Zhang Yibei’s exhibition under the theme Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds.
Even before entering the galleries, simply taking in these two strikingly different exhibition titles, I already had the sense that this would be a show in which two artists, who have arrived at their understanding of the world through entirely different paths and hold completely different working methods, would offer multiple responses to a shared theme.
Zhang Yibei | Relying on Intuition, Entering Lightly
When a “post-1960s” artist who takes research as methodology is devoted to gathering fragments of history and building a relationship with the world, the “post-1990s” artist Zhang Yibei is more concerned with landscapes and signals that evolve out of her own perception. Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds presents an artist who works lightly, relying on intuition and on observing nature and the self.
Ascending the gentle stairs leading to the second floor of the museum, passing by a diver suspended high in the air, and once again sensing the fragment of sea conjured by Zhou Xiaohu through the recovery scene of the Southern Song shipwreck Nanhai I, one enters Zhang Yibei’s exhibition.
The open spatial design here, together with the large roof structure made of timber elements, highlights Kengo Kuma’s architectural philosophy: to create spaces of light, breath, and movement through natural materials — spaces that make one feel at ease.
Very quickly, you notice enlarged plant seeds scattered across the red terracotta floor, and sea urchins shrunk into themselves. Along the blue-gray brick walls sit buckets and toolboxes resembling their real-world counterparts. A pair of walking legs is oddly inverted into the floor, with two miniature cacti placed on the soles of the shoes facing the ceiling. Giant unknown seeds lie across the broad steps, alongside enlarged toy boats. Used shampoo bottles, a half-opened can of dace with black beans... there are traces here of human life, but this is by no means the familiar, human-centered scene one might expect.
Whether it is the teddy bear hanging from the ceiling or the enlarged seeds that resemble internal organs, it must be emphasized that these are all sculptures made by the artist in marble, granite, cast aluminum, and sandstone. Here and now, they form a seamlessly nested relationship with the exhibition space. Without the need for further textual explanation, the entire exhibition is filled with a sense of perceptual inversion and blurred experience — a dizziness that each viewer, starting from their own embodied position, must experience for themselves, as if falling down Alice’s rabbit hole. Plants, tools, toys, organs... familiar objects are placed into unfamiliar perspectives; the large becomes small, the small becomes large, producing a strange sensation detached from the body. Much like the absence, within the exhibition itself, of the titular “murmurs of water and warblings of birds,” the work invites viewers, in quiet observation, to sense the intertwining of the artificial and the natural, and the process by which certain technologies are internalized as life.
Outside the museum stands the UCCA-commissioned installation Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds. This outdoor work, composed of cast aluminum, marble, and a biomimetic tree-like signal tower, is Zhang Yibei’s renewed imitation of the communication base stations disguised as trees that can be found everywhere in Yixing. It also serves as the shared title for every work in the exhibition.
Through the repeated reproduction of a copy of a tree, and through the repeated use of a single title, the entire exhibition pulses with a kind of repetition dependent on genuine feeling. It is like a diverse collection of objects relying on the same undercurrent of rhythm, co-creating one another in a state of symbiosis. The identically titled works scattered across the spacious galleries occupy the full space at varying heights, while viewers moving among them trace their own sensory melodies through the routes they choose.
With her uncanny works, Zhang Yibei lays out a labyrinth without navigational markers, making every participant another part of the completion of her work. What, then, is the artist’s work? What hidden signs lie within the information concealed in things? Gilles Deleuze revealed the surface of the modern world, pierced through the mechanical rigidity of “repetition,” and called for a humanity that is real and full of creative vitality. Zhang Yibei is precisely that differentiator who extracts minute variations from life, turning every space that contains her works into an adventurous playground where consciousness and intuition collide at random.
Hidden Within Matter: How Can It Be Further Deepened?
Returning to the main thread of Hidden Within Matter, which brings together the sharply different practices of these two artists under a single exhibition theme, curator Yao Mengxi has accomplished a rather difficult act of integration, excavating the information hidden within the “things” created by both artists.
Zhang Yibei’s path toward becoming an artist reflects experiences shared by many of her contemporaries. Born in Daqing in 1992, she was sent to Dalian for middle school in her early teens, then to the UK for high school, studied at the University of the Arts London as an undergraduate, and at the Royal College of Art for her master’s degree. She now lives and works in Beijing and Shanghai. The “things” that make up her artistic world are all-encompassing: from traditional sculptural materials such as marble and granite to more contemporary cast aluminum, readymades, and found objects. The information these objects transmit may be enlarged or reduced, suspended on the surface or hidden in texture, charged with attitude and emotion — at times dreamlike and lacking logic, at other times permeated with danger and suspense, like the scene of a crime.
Zhang Yibei has never explicitly confirmed whether her childhood growing up in the Daqing oil fields shaped her artistic path, yet in some unguarded places there seems to flow a trace that may belong to those early experiences: a fascination with tools and containers, a delight in children’s toys, and, as she recently mentioned in an interview, an interest in mechanisms of psychological defense.
To joke a little: if artists of Zhou Xiaohu’s generation had been born in Daqing, the historical destiny of the Northeast as the “eldest son” of the People’s Republic, along with the socialist legacy of “Learn from Daqing in industry,” might have offered them an inexhaustible source of artistic material. But Zhang Yibei’s generation seems unmoved by this, perhaps because the direction of the times has shifted, and the grand historical narrative of socialism has fallen out of the discourse of contemporary art. With the changing times, every generation of artists remains closely tied to its era. Should one continuously renew oneself and remain intimately connected to the present, or insist on the autonomy of the creator? Zhang Yibei is still young. Whether she revisits Daqing in the future or opens up other possibilities is only a matter of time.
