Nervous Systems: Yihao Zhang
- Anna Moss
- 9 hours ago
- 7 min read
Courtesy of the artist.
GUEST WRITER: Anna Moss
Posthumanism is a philosophy that challenges our notion of what it means to be human, in relation to animals, technology and the world. For Rosi Braidotti, in order to move away from hierarchical relations, a form of ‘estrangement and radical repositioning on the part of the subject’ is needed. In Yihao Zhang’s work, it can be seen that an estrangement and reposition of the subject is seen through a mechanical lens.
Zhang’s artistic output spans kinetic sculpture, installation and performance. At the core of his practice are industrial assemblages, often made from second-hand car parts, that run on intentionally misguided motors. Carefully shaping their path of motion through an often lengthy process of trial and error, choreography is the medium through which the artist explores the central question of agency. Zhang’s sculptures rotate, probe and reposition themselves in seemingly infinite yet repetitive ways. Crucially, they are kinetic sculptures that only bare semblance to machines. In this way, their movements are abstract. They possess artistic and not utilitarian purposes. With virtuoso construction, Zhang creates vacillations between lightness and weight, action and inaction. These subtle motions echo a kind of hesitation that could only belong to something sentient. And it is precisely this hesitation, or wavering, that concerns Zhang. Traversing themes of surveillance, sexuality and the natural world, these threads are united by the struggle between freedom and control.
When faced with Zhang’s sculptures, the boundaries between machine, animal and human often appear destabilised. Silent Agitation is an installation of several sculptures that seek to interrogate oppression and surveillance. Part of the sculpture features a small cage, wherein two metal slabs appear to crawl. They appear almost like crabs scuttling across an ocean floor. Their movements, however vigorous, are futile. They are just in a cage, but bound to each other like prisoners, constricted in more ways than one. Even the most violent of their movements only rattles their cage, which in turn is connected to various other foreboding mechanisms. Zhang’s structure alludes to Michel Foucault’s extensive writing on disciplinary systems in society; in particular how many areas of public life mirror the prison complex. Another sculpture within Silent Agitation revolves around one central, orbiting structure. With its spiky and upright appearance, it conjures a surveillance tower, accompanied by three other smaller counterparts. The spectrum of movement across each sculptural object ranges from anxious scuttling, ominous churning and gentle swaying of a leather whip. Zhang’s strength as an artist is his ability to co-ordinate minute impressions that culminate in a far greater emotional effect.
Seen its totality (the installation has five sections in total), it’s not a literal narrative that
emerges, but an examination of the ‘machinery’ of power and how it functions. Viewers may see this through a variety of lenses. Zhang’s machine bodies operate self-protectively, as though they possess a nervous system. This sense of hybridisation is not just artistic, but rooted in structuralist theory. The term cyborg, coined in the 1960s, denotes a being with both organic and inorganic parts. Post-human philosophers like Donna Haraway make the claim that as of the late twentieth century, ‘we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism’. Such ideas extend Foucauldian frameworks of oppression and the belief that they create ‘docile bodies’. Along with a theoretical focus, Zhang also brings forth his own queer experience to look at the interplay between individuals and their environment. In a heternormative culture, homosexuality often creates survival strategies, hypervigilance and ultimately an attempt to locate a sense of self. The artist’s use of material and motion reflects this tentativeness. His sculptures readjust and extend as if scanning for threat, or perhaps reaching out for something to grasp, an object of comfort. The complex tension between hostility and tenderness is also reflected in forms that appear militant, yet are soft to touch: plastic nuclei with ‘prickles’, or leather edges shaped like razors.
Whilst many of Zhang’s works have a man-made appearance, sculptures such as Unlanded take driftwood as its central material. Here, the organic subject becomes estranged and dislocated. Chains reappear across Zhang’s work as a motif. In this sculpture, the piece is physically shackled to its new environment, the gallery wall itself. In Unlanded, it is a sense of implied, rather than real motion, that creates an arresting psychological landscape. Zhang sketches an undulating path in soil, rather than with a motor: a closed loop with no promise of arrival. Zhang practices addresses our post-human moment, whilst also maintaining a practice deeply rooted in sense experience. The artist literally and figuratively examines how all subjects navigate the world, through tactile and intuitive means. Infants stumble and crawl, grab and taste, before they learn to navigate the world and understand it intellectually. Zhang’s intricate pathways mirror this lack of resolve, extending it to historical, political and sociological structures of experience.
Q&A by Plasma
Your works suggest systems of surveillance. Who is the observer in this dynamic?
The observer shifts. At moments I am the observer, designing the rules and starting the mechanisms. The machines themselves also act as observers when their movements register and respond to the space. Most importantly the audience becomes part of the observing loop. Their presence, their look and their hesitation feed back into the system and complete the dynamic. That circulation between maker, machine and viewer is where the work lives.
Is queerness in your work something that can be recognised, or expressed in more indirect ways?
Both. My queer experience can be an explicit theme when a piece directly addresses identity, migration or constraint. But often queerness is indirect. It appears through rhythms, bodily relations, limits and slips in the work. I prefer leaving space for multiple readings. I want people to find recognition if they bring that frame, and to encounter other resonances if they do not.
Some of your pieces use second-hand car parts. Do these materials carry histories for you or are they stripped of their previous function?
They carry traces of prior lives but they are not fixed by them. I value the history in the marks and wear while also treating parts as available forces to be repurposed. When an old gear or a dented panel meets my welding and motors a new narrative emerges. The previous function and my intervention overlap to generate meaning rather than cancel one another out.
What kind of interpretation of your work feels completely off to you, something you strongly disagree with?
I push back when the work is read only as sterile engineering or technical spectacle and its human dimension is erased. I welcome readings about mechanism and form, but not at the expense of the embodied tensions, the emotional textures and the lived histories that motivate the pieces. Reducing the work to mere gadgetry misses its ethical and affective core.
When a performer enters the installation, how does the relationship function? Do the live bodies alter the work, or get absorbed by them?
It is reciprocal. A body will trigger different behaviours in the machine and the machine will carve out new possibilities for the performer. Performers are not swallowed by the devices. Rather they inhabit a shared field where each action reshapes the other. The presence of a human body often reveals the machine’s intentions and vulnerabilities, and the machine in turn reframes the performer’s gestures.
How does your background in film impact how you think about sequencing, timing, framing?
Film trained me to stage time. I think in sequences, in edits and in how one shot or movement leads into the next. That sensibility translates into the way I choreograph motor paths, pauses and the viewer’s route through a space. I care about beats, anticipation and reprieve. In installation I try to create readable temporal arcs so that a viewer experiences the work not only as an object but as a short sequence or scene.
The works reflect behavior under unstable systems. Do you think instability has become a defining condition of contemporary life?
Instability is certainly prominent now, but I avoid treating it as only a diagnosis. I am more interested in how people adapt, improvise and make temporary structures to survive. My work observes those adaptive behaviours and makes them visible. Instability can be harmful and frightening, yet it also produces new tactics and forms of solidarity. That ambivalence is what I try to render.
What are your defining interests outside of contemporary art?
I am drawn to making and fixing things by hand. I read philosophy around power and the body, and I follow performance and dance closely. Theatre and choreography influence how I think about presence and timing. I also enjoy the tactile practice of repairing machines or furniture. Those activities are not hobbies separate from my practice. They feed the work and my thinking in very practical ways.
Are there any projects you are looking forward to for the rest of 2026?
Yes. I am developing a series of kinetic structures that explore repeated gestures and audience activation, and I have a collaborative performance project in rehearsal that will bring live bodies back into the installations. Both projects aim to deepen the conversation between movement, material and memory. I am excited to test these works in public and see how audiences complete them.
Review written by Anna Moss. Interview conducted by Plasma Contemporary.
Special thanks to Green Grammar for moderating the collaboration.
References
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto University of Minnesota, 2016.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) p.89.
