Grasp a glimpse!
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Stillness, aftershock (2025)
Duration: 14:20
Ambisonic 16-channels
This is an ambisonic-visual work reflecting on the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which struck the artist’s hometown and left a gap in her childhood memory. Seventeen years later, she returns through interviews with surviving family members, weaving together sound, photography, and moving images to retrace and reconstruct what was once absent.
This is a deeply personal work, grounded in reality. It asks: in the face of disaster, what do we hear, see, touch, and feel? By layering voices and images, the artist seeks to enter the inner worlds of survivors and evoke their subtle, often inexpressible sensations. Though marked by sorrow, the work also reveals moments of softness—plants growing among ruins, the remembrance of loved ones—quiet affirmations of life’s fragility, persistence, and vitality.
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Marinating(2025)
Duration: 9:35
Binaural
Marinating is an experimental audiovisual work exploring the fluid nature of memory, time, and perception. Using a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera from the early 2000s, the film contrasts outdated technology with contemporary culture, questioning how we reconstruct experiences. A conversation between the artist and AI reflects on the blurred boundaries between human and machine, inspired by N. Katherine Hayles’ concept of the posthuman subject.
The composition blends everyday sounds with ritualistic elements, evoking a cyclical sense of time. Through mismatched sound and image, frame-dropping effects, and disrupted attention, Marinate invites the audience into a meditation on transience and perception.
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Life within 500 meters (2024)
Duration: 8:14
Binaural
This sound-based project uses binaural listening to explore the emotional and social dimensions of perceiving one’s immediate surroundings. Focusing on the artist’s neighbourhood in London’s West Ham, the work captures ambient sounds and informal voices from within a loosely defined 500-meter radius — a symbolic space of the “nearby”.
These everyday sonic fragments — passing trains, market chatter, birdsong, distant conversations — are reframed as active carriers of memory and presence. The work is informed by social anthropologist Xiang Biao’s concept of the “disappearance of the nearby,” which critiques how urban life has eroded the emotional and social substance of proximity. By listening closely to the overlooked, the artist invites us to reimagine our relationship to place — not through spectacle, but through subtle acts of attention.
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Global Resonance, Scent Echo (2025)
Sound-Scent Installation
Group work
This multisensory installation reimagines the form of a lottery drawing machine to explore themes of globalization, cultural exchange, and embodied perception. A single transparent acrylic sphere, filled with spices from different regions, is set in motion by airflow from concealed fans. As it rolls and collides, it releases shifting combinations of scent and sound—an evolving composition shaped by movement and chance.
By intertwining smell and sound—two often overlooked senses in exhibition spaces—this work invites deeper engagement with memory, emotion, and the body. Viewers are encouraged to come close, listening to and inhaling the subtle interplay of spices in motion. The installation evokes the fluidity of cultural identity, the randomness of connection, and the invisible forces that shape our sensory experience. This installation work was first presented as the opening performance at Open City Documentary Festival 2025 in London
This work was developed as a collective creation involving Xiaoya Zhao, Peifeng Cai, Han Zhang, Jiaye Wang, Hao Liu, Aobo Gao
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Goings-on (2022)
Duration: 9:13
Stereo
A sound video installation art built on random daily interactions and field recordings. Aim to produce a sensory experience that emphasises individual spectator sensations while deconstructing the sense of work. The film is presented in the shape of a triptych and explores collage method and its postmodernity, as well as constantly encouraging the audience to dig for new possibilities in picture juxtaposition.
The sound design grows spatially across four speakers, finding resonance with moving pictures.Based on everyday recordings but generated in an unusual manner. Inspired by John Cage’s idea of temporal experience in music, sounds can move in any direction here.
When presented to the public, they combat the public memories shaped by authorities and show my response to the mundane experience in today’s world as an individual. In the best of circumstances, I hope that when looking at it in ten Years’ time it would be possible for the audience to grasp a glimpse of life in the 2020s.
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Duration(2021)
Sonic Land Art
This is a site-specific sonic land art installation based on a fallen tree, using cotton ropes and plastic bags used to make noises based on the weather.
Here, the silently falling tree becomes a new link between human society and nature. Inspired by Jean Baudrill-ard’s simulacra and hyperreality theory (located at Wentworth College, University of York), this piece might be viewed as a large stimulation of change between reality (the tree) and the cyber world (the rope and plastic bags).
Using this metaphor, concentrate on the social distance, visualisation, and information fragmentation of post-pandemic human settings.
