Artist Statement

My name is Zhang Yuxin. I was born in Beijing in 2000. My artistic practice began with a strong interest in painting, through which I explored ways of expressing my observations of the world. During this process, I became increasingly aware of how sensitive I am to small details.

I later studied Visual Communication Design as an undergraduate. Compared with the intuitive process of traditional painting, I was introduced to more structured and systematic methodologies. I gradually realised that a creative process does not necessarily need to begin with a clear answer. It can also unfold like an experiment, developing through continuous attempts, failures, revisions, and new ways of understanding.

After moving to London, unfamiliar surroundings, environments, and experiences made me more sensitive to the world around me. I began to realise that many of my works do not come from a grand question, but from a very small moment: a breath, a bubble, a puddle, a gust of wind, a touch, or a brief change occurring between the body and its environment. I enjoy looking for something unusual within these ordinary and seemingly insignificant things, and finding poetry within phenomena.

To me, these phenomena are never isolated. A breath enters the air; a touch extends beyond the body; the movement of water is shaped by its environment; and a seemingly simple bodily action can be captured and translated by sensors, code, and machines, before being returned to the body in another form. Between people, environments, materials, technologies, and other forms of life, there seem to be invisible threads that are constantly crossing and changing one another. I have become interested in these relationships themselves.

My work therefore often begins with an element of nature or the environment. Through embodied experience, material experimentation, and computational systems, I try to transform processes that are difficult to see, hear, or touch into experiences that can be perceived. I do not try to explain nature, nor do I want technology to exist merely as a tool. Instead, I am interested in what happens when bodies, materials, environments, and technologies genuinely enter into relationships with one another.

For me, the world is not made up of a collection of independent subjects. We are always situated within relationships, and it is through these relationships that we become who we are. The body does not end at the surface of the skin, just as the environment is not simply a background outside the body. Breath, touch, sound, wind, water, materials, code, and machines can all become ways of connecting one thing to another.

My practice therefore continues to search for these small and invisible connections. Through them, I try to understand how we perceive the world, while also making perceptible those relationships that have long surrounded us, yet are so often overlooked.