Zhuyang Liu

Zhuyang Liu | Helmeting | 2025

Your work often blends humor, absurdity, and chaos with deep socio-political commentary. How do you navigate the balance between playfulness and seriousness in your projects?

Humor for me, is more like a temperament—a way of catching reality, and also a survival mindset. It’s like a “color” that accompanies how we live in the world, carrying a certain texture. Of course, the themes I deal with can be heavy, but the form of expression doesn’t always have to be. I often treat the process of making itself as part of the work, so play and seriousness flow in and out of each other. Sometimes I start with a very serious idea but approach it in a way that makes even me laugh. I guess I do“play seriously ”

The “Human-Skin Helmet” is both unsettling and intimate. What inspired you to create this object, and how do you want audiences to feel when wearing or encountering it?

The initial impulse was simple—I wish to make a wearable, almost fashion-like object. I love vehicles and am often around instruments, systems, and mechanical materials. I’ve also always been interested in making what I call “soft installations.” For instance, I once created a giant teddy bear whose head was stuffed with a vinyl record, and inside its belly was a mechanical sound system—the bear could only be “activated” if I DJ’d on its head. I love exploring the relationship between operability and installation.

What you said its interesting to me. The helmet, to me, is already a device of protection and isolation. But adding “skin” makes it ambiguous—it becomes both an outer shell and another body. I’d like to leave it open for how people should feel. Some may feel safe, others may feel violated. What matters to me is that it creates an ambiguous zone—between self and other, between protection and exposure. And when it intersects with fashion, installation, and the body, it extends into a larger question that runs through my practice: how we understand identity and body politics, especially when those are continually reshaped by capital and technology.

Zhuyang Liu | The Gourmet Critics | 2024

In “HELMETING”, sound is experienced in a very physical and bodily way. How do you see the relationship between sound, the body, and identity in your practice?

Sound is not abstract—it penetrates the body and makes you feel resonance directly. In that moment, you realize the “self” is not isolated, but part of a flow with others and the environment. Identity in this sense becomes like a frequency: it can be tuned, disturbed, or reorganized.

I also think of sound as a deeply collective symbol. It is triggered by physical phenomena but accumulates into shared memory and cultural markers. Sound is a medium of communication, a marker of group identity, even something like a token, a currency, a digital grammar. In “HELMETING”, I used sound in a very direct way: it is the thread of the work, but also a metaphor for the social systems we live in. In an age when AI algorithms increasingly shape how we listen and communicate, I’m interested in foregrounding the power and grammar behind sound itself.

Many of your works intervene in public or social spaces, sometimes creating confusion or destabilization. What do you hope these disruptions reveal?

It’s like when a glitch appears in a system—it shows that the everyday is not natural. Daily life is maintained by rules, habits, and orders, but it’s constantly interrupted by the sudden and the improvised. For me, “disruption” is less about destruction and more about creating an opening for other possibilities—an attempt to “reopen the world.” Instability is not total chaos; it’s a relative motion within stability, the interplay between change and persistence, like an ecosystem. When those orders temporarily fail, people may glimpse other ways of living.

And sometimes such disruptions also expose how exhibitions themselves aren’t just exhibitions: they can be advertisements, capital operations, entertainment products. Confusion, then, becomes an opening—it reveals the layered, blurred logic behind our daily structures.

Zhuyang Liu | Helmeting | 2025

Your works are often described as “meta-concepts” that evolve over time. How do you decide when a work is finished—or is it always ongoing?

I prefer to think of works as ecosystems rather than objects. They grow and mutate across contexts and mediums. “Completion” feels more like a temporary pause than a final endpoint. A project might be a performance today, an installation tomorrow, and a piece of writing the next day. What matters is how it continues to speak to reality.

For example, one project I began as a music album. I invited a 3D artist to design the cover, but the process transformed into me creating an installation-like album. As we worked, we started meeting weekly, learning together, and unexpectedly extended the narrative into an audio-visual piece shaped around AI. That, in turn, opened entirely new directions. So my works often contain multiple “units,” each of which could stand alone, but which can also connect into something larger—like a hybrid organism that keeps growing, mutating, and reproducing. This ecological unfolding mirrors the way I observe contemporary grammar itself: a work can be an artwork, but also an advertisement, a interface. I’m interested in the ambiguities that arise in that overlap.

In “The Gourmet Critics”, humor, horror, and sonic experimentation are tightly interwoven. How do you use absurdist performance to address issues like body politics and social critique?

Absurdity allows me to translate complex social mechanisms into bodily experience. In this performance we “eat each other’s brains,” which is ridiculous, but it makes consumption, critique, and identity suddenly visceral. The audience laughs, but also feels uneasy. That mix of amusement and discomfort mirrors social reality itself: both absurd and real at the same time.

Aesthetically, the piece is amplified by cross-genre collisions: the noise energy of hardcore punk, the extremity of death metal, and the performative stance of drag culture. These elements, when layered together, create a disjointed absurdity. The collage not only disrupts aesthetic conventions but turns the performance into a site of cross-material collaboration and conflict. I’m fascinated by this tension—when different sounds, bodies, and performance traditions collide, new meanings emerge. And often this uncertainty itself is labelled as “absurd,” which I find very telling. To me, absurdity isn’t emptiness—it’s the mirror image of social logic pushed to its extreme.

Zhuyang Liu | Helmeting | 2025

You often experiment with non-traditional instruments and sound-making devices. What role does instrument-building play in your artistic philosophy?

Instrument-building is a way of redistributing relationships for me. Traditional instruments carry history, discipline, and standardized modes of playing . I perform traditional instrument; I enjoy it in this aspect. But when I use a suitcase, a helmet, or a household appliance to produce sound, there are no pre-given instructions—you have to renegotiate the relationship. These objects become companions, tricksters, even potential weapons, rather than neutral tools.

I think of these devices as part of what I call the “sonic arsenal”—a term I coined in my writing. An arsenal implies both storage and tactics. Sound here is not just aesthetic material but energy that can be deployed. Improvisation becomes its tactic: unlike composition as a long-term strategy, improvisation is about immediate response and constant adjustment. Building an instrument is like inventing a new grammar—it forces both performer and audience into the unknown. That unpredictability is the energy my sonic arsenal tries to unleash.

With the scientific/engineering aspect, the sonic arsenal connects to acoustics, physics, and computer science: from resonance and noise control to ultrasound applications, from speech recognition to algorithmic composition. On a philosophical level, it is not just a repository of sounds but of modes of perception. We rarely hear vibration itself; what we hear are culturally coded shapes like melody and theme. In that sense, instruments are grammar generators—they determine how we listen and make sense of sound. Building instruments means producing new grammars, loosening the grip of established perceptual structures.

In this way, the sonic arsenal resonates with what I described earlier as hybrid organisms: each instrument is a unit that can exist on its own, but also combine with others to form a living energy body. And “arsenal” here is not a metaphor for war—it points to how perception itself can be armed, manipulated, and reconfigured into generative tactics.