Listen: Whale Bones, Shipwrecks, and Routers Are Whispering
Author / Sun Jiahui
Originally published on NOWNESS 2026.5.27
Shipwrecks, ceramics, stones, metal, “whale bones,” tree-like signal towers, and silver routers lie scattered throughout the space, together forming a “site of perception.” Information from different times, spaces, and civilizations is reassembled within this field. A vaguely cinematic structure begins to emerge, and as viewers move through it, they seem to enter a montage that is continuously unfolding.
Today, more than ever, people have grown accustomed to understanding the world through screens: streams of images, instant information, algorithmic feeds, AI-generated content... Images switch rapidly, information constantly refreshes, and the amount of time the eye rests on any one thing grows ever shorter. Our “perception,” too, has become increasingly singular.
From April 3 to June 21, 2026, UCCA Clay Museum is presenting Hidden Within Matter: Zhou Xiaohu & Zhang Yibei, an exhibition that attempts to draw the relationship between people and the world back into a state that is slower, more hesitant, and closer to bodily experience. Through ceramics, navigation, shipwrecks, and the history of global trade, Zhou Xiaohu looks again at how “things” shape civilization, desire, and world order. Zhang Yibei, by contrast, turns her gaze toward the invisible networks of information that structure contemporary society, tracing those connections between people and the world that cannot easily be explained in language through signal towers, industrial materials, and subconscious experience.
This time, NOWNESS traveled to UCCA Clay Museum in Yixing, Jiangsu. Designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates, it is located in the core area of the Tao’erchang cultural district in Dingshu Town. Outside the museum are cafés, a market, and snack trucks; children run laughing through the plaza, occasionally pushing open the museum doors in curiosity, staring at the silent exhibits inside.
As information becomes increasingly immaterial, do “things” still preserve another ancient and authentic mode of transmission? Two radically different paths slowly converge within the exhibition space. The information lingering in the texture of materials, in the cracks of time, and beneath the surface of reality gradually reveals different meanings as viewers move through it.
Zhang Yibei Listening to Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds
Zhang Yibei titled her exhibition Murmurs of Water and Warblings of Birds, and yet upon entering the gallery, you cannot locate any actual source of sound. The installation is permeated by an almost ethereal silence. Marble-carved objects lie scattered throughout, only revealing a disorienting temporal slippage on closer inspection: life-sized routers, hollowed-out stone boats, human body parts pieced together from bronze and aluminum, a withered cactus, enlarged seeds...
“This title doesn’t describe the exhibition,” Zhang Yibei says. “It’s more like part of the exhibition itself. I hope viewers can imagine certain sounds, a memory, or a new thought, a story, within the silent gallery.” The artist invites viewers to become “sensors” themselves, retrieving the shapes of flowing water and the rhythms of birdsong from their own store of memory, drawing information out through things.
In this exhibition, she no longer emphasizes concept, but instead pursues a state of “consciously entering the unconscious,” allowing materials alone to tell her where to go. Most of the works in the exhibition came from incidental moments in her life: discarded toys, cleaning tools left forgotten in ordinary corners, seeds picked up during a walk... She brings them back to the studio, observing, touching, and waiting until intuition sends a signal. Take, for example, the withered cactus — once her favorite plant: two bulbs stacked together, the lower one rotted away, and she broke off the upper one hoping to replant it, but put it aside because she was too busy. So it slowly withered, day by day drawing closer to death. Unable to let it go, Zhang recast it as a sculpture, allowing it to “come back to life.”
Zhang Yibei’s works are full of material “misalignments.” Marble is carved into routers; bronze and aluminum are shaped into squeezed toothpaste tubes or extremities of the body. “There are many different conditions behind materials. Everyone gives materials different ‘avatars.’” Her sensitivity to materials goes beyond the visual and tactile; she is equally attentive to their “social life” — their price, origin, extraction methods, and routes of circulation. The marble used in the exhibition comes from Sichuan, Italy, and elsewhere, with enormous differences in cost, yet “as materials, they are equal.”
The metal components were originally planned to be entirely in bronze, but because tensions between the United States and Iran caused copper prices to surge, she switched to aluminum. Aluminum is lighter and better suited in color, yet its market price is far lower than bronze. These aluminum elements become a micro-level manifestation of the global circulation of capital. Matter is never neutral — it carries price, politics, and history. Outside the museum, a giant saw blade used in her actual stone-cutting process also becomes part of the display. “When a stone is cut down from the mountain, it moves from an original living position into a position of death. But because it is cut and polished, it enters a new state of life.” In her view, life and death form a continuous cycle.
We Cannot Place Ourselves Above “Things”
Outside the exhibition hall lies a biomimetic tree-like signal tower, positioned horizontally — something Zhang Yibei discovered during her field research in Yixing. These communications facilities, disguised as trees, conceal technology within the natural landscape, sending out signals that connect estranged people. “In the society we live in now, there aren’t that many direct connections between people, but through public infrastructure, it reconnects people who don’t know each other, or who exist in states of estrangement.” Yet this “tree” actively drives birds away, emitting a specific wavelength that prevents them from nesting. “It’s quite sad.” A biomimetic tree that should, in some sense, “belong” to nature ends up expelling nature, as if describing the awkward condition of contemporary humanity: we use technology to imitate nature, while becoming ever more estranged from it.
Zhang Yibei introduces the concept of phenology into her creative framework. Phenology originally refers to cyclical phenomena in the natural world produced by environmental influences — the blooming of plants, the migration of animals, the coming and going of migratory birds.
In her view, contemporary society likewise contains its own form of “phenology”: the electromagnetic waves of signal towers, the data flows of routers, the drifting of seeds on the wind. These invisible currents weave together the neural pathways of society. She has researched the history of the Little Ice Age in the Ming and Qing dynasties: climate change triggered resource crises through a chain reaction, timber shortages forced society to shift from woodcutting to coal-burning, which in turn led to systemic adjustments in the economic structure.
“Environment” is not only natural ecology, but also a field constituted by cities, technology, and information flows. In the exhibition space, bodies, plants, and industrial objects are placed side by side. She invites viewers to become perceptual “sensors,” using their bodies to feel the temperature, weight, and texture carried by materials, as well as the emotions and memories they stir in silence. “I hope viewers won’t try to imagine what this exhibition is doing. I hope they just feel it completely, as if wandering through mountains and rivers.”
The silent gallery, in fact, activates the richest sounds. Each person hears different water: a stream, the ocean, a glacier, vapor; each person hears different birdsong: sparrows outside the window in the morning, cuckoos in the mountains, some cry remembered from childhood. This gallery does not lack sound — it returns sound to the interior of each person. When outer sound disappears, inner sound begins to rise.
Looking at it now, the juxtaposition of Zhou Xiaohu and Zhang Yibei ultimately completes the concept of Hidden Within Matter. Zhou Xiaohu offers a “vertical” perspective by tracing the movement of matter across historical timelines; Zhang Yibei, on the other hand, observes in a “horizontal” dimension the multiple avatars of matter within the same time and space. Both reject the same mode of seeing: placing the human at the center and reducing things to background or instrument.
“We cannot place ourselves above things,” Zhou Xiaohu says. Hidden within matter is not only information, but also a form of agency. Things are in motion; information reveals itself.
