Through a critical eye of London’s social environment, Yihao Zhang explores urban alienation with installation art. After graduating from the Royal College of Art (RCA), he developed an interest in metal, mechanical structures, and industrial materials, and began creating a series of works exploring the conceptual relationship between obedience and restraint based on his personal experiences. The work considers space and connection — urban alienation appears to mirror brutalist design.
He articulates on his project: “They are not merely materials, but structural metaphors: they allow me to express tension that static forms cannot — between stability and collapse, desire and distance, belonging and estrangement.”
His art is heavily influenced by key philosophers like Michel Foucault whose principles of social control see surveillance as the core to regulating people’s behaviour from within. This power operates through institutions like schools, workplaces and prisons by the control of space, time and activity whereby examination creates "docile bodies" (Foucault) that are conditioned to regulate themselves into their hierarchical fixture. Here, Zhang plays with the idea of obedience and restraint, articulating repression through the mechanical: his structures are compelled to move independently — trapped in their repetitive rhythms.
Within his piece Unlanded (2025), driftwood seems to find itself trapped. Immobilised and self-conscious, it reveals the individual migrated, arrived yet perpetually in “a suspended search, a gesture repeated” as Zhang explains. You can sense the wood creaking, feeling the force of its system that simultaneously holds and constricts, organic matter is found in a mechanical grip. The chain and threads dropping into soil combine the organic with steel. Although still and appearing to be rooted, the hanging material is unfixed and temperamental, changeable. The piece holds weight without a landing point. The chain’s rigid links show the clear sequences of migration, like his own relocation to the UK. It evokes Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, which articulates, “we will live the exact same lives again an infinite number of times” (Neil Sinhababu). So, every system in our lives is recurring endlessly. The question is not if this is true, but rather if you can accept this repetition. Unlanded (2025)’s floating form introduces this sense of instability; it mirrors the uncertainty and disorientation that accompany the process of acceptance and adjustment.
Zhang explains: “I’m not interested in telling a story about escape. I want to build a space where the cage reveals how it functions.” Through reimagining London’s framework, the intricacy of assemblage; its required balance, fastenings and structure consider the wider systems that are built around us.
An example of this is Amor Fati (2025) and its dark brick exhibition walls. The creation itself is awe-inspiring: its grand size draws attention to how small the human form is compared to what we can create. We can also see ourselves as the framework before us: as Zhang articulates, the materials take on bodily qualities, “strong yet exposed, precise yet vulnerable to friction, weight and time. Through movement, they take on bodily qualities: they strain, hesitate, repeat and endure.” The space is the unconscious made architectural. Its dark shadow and looming structure invites us to contemplate what in ourselves has been forgotten, ignored or overlooked yet remains functional.
Zhang’s engagement in framework, philosophical and otherwise, continued at Nothing Holds on Its Own, showing To Touch, Barely (2025) which resonates with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, "Being is always being-with." Feeling the emotional precarity of modern social worlds, Zhang draws on queer experiences as well as how he finds there is more echo than conversation within the intimacy of city life. There is a twitch of recognition of what in ourselves has become machine in a life that demands function over feeling. To Touch, Barely shares the same feel as Temporary Rhizome (2024), whose mechanical wheel feet meet a spinal structure, like a body. As London is a city of great moving parts, it mirrors how we work together whilst maintaining ourselves in the hope that we run a system that allows the whole to move seamlessly, the same way this artwork does with its wheels and pulley. Zhang stresses this as “the being-singular plural” to reconcile, stressing existence as being-with others, reliant on relationships to hold our own. Fragility meets the durable, as we observe the forms, particularly of To Touch, Barely.
Mirroring these social systems, you can feel endured pressure and the mechanical pull of the motorised artworks. Although unblinking, steel and chain holds strength in motion and it is in this stoic power that the emotion of these works is impressive. When looking at the empty, hanging structures, one sees that they embody something moving despite where life is missing. Zhang reveals our current state in his art, whereby he envisions us, refracted through the mirror of his machinery as “unresolved, trembling and alive”.
Temporary Rhizome 2024
Amor Fati, 2025
You’ve mentioned seeing your body as these metal structures, what else goes through your mind whilst you create and work with the materials you choose?
When I begin a new work, I usually start with metal and motors — materials that feel cold, rigid, and almost stubborn. My studio becomes a site of constant testing: how a motor can push against gravity, how a piece of steel reacts when forced into a gesture it was never meant to perform. This experimental phase can last from a week to a month, and during that time I’m not only shaping the material, I’m also confronting myself.
I often see these structures as mechanical organisms, bodies that mirror humanity through their contradictions. They embody exhaustion, repetition, and a quiet sadness. When I connect power to them, they begin to perform endlessly, as if I’ve given them life, yet also trapped them within the limits of my design. That tension between agency and constraint, animation and submission, is always present in my mind as I work. It’s a way for me to externalise the emotional and societal pressures that bodies, especially queer bodies, navigate in real life.
I often see these structures as mechanical organisms, bodies that mirror humanity through their contradictions. They embody exhaustion, repetition, and a quiet sadness. When I connect power to them, they begin to perform endlessly, as if I’ve given them life, yet also trapped them within the limits of my design. That tension between agency and constraint, animation and submission, is always present in my mind as I work. It’s a way for me to externalise the emotional and societal pressures that bodies, especially queer bodies, navigate in real life.
Your work is united by an idea of the body as separate from the whole, examining the individual within institutional structures. What do you hope the viewer understands about themselves through this experience of separation?
What I ultimately hope is that viewers feel something emotional before they try to intellectualise it. The machines perform in ways that appear absurd at first glance, looping gestures that feel excessive or pointless. But within that repetition, I want people to sense a shared sadness, the feeling of being caught between individuality and the systems that frame our lives.
The separation in my work is not prescriptive. It’s an open invitation for viewers to question how they move through institutional structures: how much of their identity is self-driven, and how much is shaped by mechanisms beyond their control. If they recognise themselves in the machines’ exhaustion or stubborn persistence, then the work has done its job.
The separation in my work is not prescriptive. It’s an open invitation for viewers to question how they move through institutional structures: how much of their identity is self-driven, and how much is shaped by mechanisms beyond their control. If they recognise themselves in the machines’ exhaustion or stubborn persistence, then the work has done its job.
What truths are you trying to make visible? What motivates you to keep creating?
I use machine performance — whether it’s a gesture of worship, self-cleaning, confrontation, or conflict — to reveal truths that feel difficult to articulate through language alone. These actions become metaphors for contemporary conditions: the absurdity of queer bodies negotiating with governmental or societal expectations, the tension between visibility and vulnerability, the constant push and pull between autonomy and discipline.
What keeps me creating is the belief that these mechanical performances can expose something real and often unspoken. The machines allow me to speak about power, intimacy, and identity through a non-human proxy. They can exaggerate, distort, or repeat a truth until it becomes undeniable. As long as there are structures shaping how we exist in the world, I feel compelled to keep making work that questions them.
What keeps me creating is the belief that these mechanical performances can expose something real and often unspoken. The machines allow me to speak about power, intimacy, and identity through a non-human proxy. They can exaggerate, distort, or repeat a truth until it becomes undeniable. As long as there are structures shaping how we exist in the world, I feel compelled to keep making work that questions them.
Unlanded, 2025
How do you balance freedom and control within your work? What does your work say about modern expression? What in your work rebels against surveillance?
Balancing freedom and control is always the most challenging aspect of my work. My mechanical systems begin with strict structures, yet freedom emerges through collisions, deviations, or subtle malfunctions, revealing the machines’ own agency. This tension mirrors contemporary life: our gestures and desires are shaped by algorithms, institutions, and invisible power structures. The machines’ repetitive, constrained motions reflect modern bodies negotiating autonomy, while their unpredictability and illegibility act as a subtle rebellion against surveillance and control.
What is something in the City of London that you’ve felt connected to lately? Where do you go to be inspired as an artist, or to feel all that you feel the city embodies?
Lately I’ve been drawn to the small, defensive details of London — the anti-bird spikes, metal fences, fragmented benches. These quiet architectures of rejection feel very close to the emotional tone of my work: bodies almost touching but never allowed to.
I often go to the Barbican. Its brutalist weight creates this strange mix of intimacy and distance, shaping how your body moves without ever directly touching you. Tate Modern, especially the Turbine Hall, does something similar on a different scale, expanding and collapsing the space between people.
I live in Shoreditch and often go to some queer spaces like Dalston Superstore and some hidden bars and clubs in east London. The way people negotiate desire, hesitation, and brief contact there mirrors the barely gestures in my machines — connection that is temporary, coded, or interrupted. These urban encounters become starting points for the restrained, trembling movements I design in my mechanical bodies.
I often go to the Barbican. Its brutalist weight creates this strange mix of intimacy and distance, shaping how your body moves without ever directly touching you. Tate Modern, especially the Turbine Hall, does something similar on a different scale, expanding and collapsing the space between people.
I live in Shoreditch and often go to some queer spaces like Dalston Superstore and some hidden bars and clubs in east London. The way people negotiate desire, hesitation, and brief contact there mirrors the barely gestures in my machines — connection that is temporary, coded, or interrupted. These urban encounters become starting points for the restrained, trembling movements I design in my mechanical bodies.
Architecture, space and material is key within your work, how do you feel when you stand in your exhibition space?
Standing in the exhibition space always feels like entering a negotiation. The space becomes a counterpart, almost a collaborator. I’m very aware of pressure points: where a machine’s sound will bounce, where a shadow will fall, where a viewer might instinctively step back.
There’s also a strange vulnerability. Once the machines are installed and activated, I can no longer control them moment-by-moment, they exist independently. Their movements interact with the space in ways I can’t fully anticipate. Sometimes they resonate with the architecture; sometimes they clash violently with it. I love that tension.
I often feel a mix of anxiety and intimacy, like I’m exposing something personal but through a mechanical body that takes on the weight for me. When the audience enters, the space transforms again, becoming a site where all these forces — material, architecture, bodies — slowly rub against each other.
There’s also a strange vulnerability. Once the machines are installed and activated, I can no longer control them moment-by-moment, they exist independently. Their movements interact with the space in ways I can’t fully anticipate. Sometimes they resonate with the architecture; sometimes they clash violently with it. I love that tension.
I often feel a mix of anxiety and intimacy, like I’m exposing something personal but through a mechanical body that takes on the weight for me. When the audience enters, the space transforms again, becoming a site where all these forces — material, architecture, bodies — slowly rub against each other.
Can you tell us any examples of your experience that inspire your work?
A lot of my work comes from lived experiences that left a physical imprint on me. Growing up in China as a queer person, I was always navigating layers of social pressure — expectations about how to behave, how to fit in, how to perform a version of myself that felt acceptable. That constant negotiation became a kind of choreography, a quiet, exhausting dance of self-adjustment. It taught me what it means for a body to move within limits, to perform without ever fully expressing.
Those early years of hiding, adapting, and resisting shaped the way I design my mechanical bodies. Their repetitive, constrained movements echo my own experience of trying to find identity within structures that often didn’t allow space for it.
My work is also influenced by the emotional landscape of queer relationships, especially the fragility and speed of connection in queer communities. In cities, intimacy can feel like fast consumption: intense, electric, but easily collapsing under fear, misunderstanding, or unspoken vulnerability. I’ve experienced relationships that were full of longing but built on unstable ground, where touch felt both urgent and impossible.
These experiences become metaphors in my machines’ gestures: movements that reach out but never fully connect, cycles that begin with desire and end in exhaustion, bodies that fight, worship, or lean toward each other but remain separated by invisible constraints.
Those early years of hiding, adapting, and resisting shaped the way I design my mechanical bodies. Their repetitive, constrained movements echo my own experience of trying to find identity within structures that often didn’t allow space for it.
My work is also influenced by the emotional landscape of queer relationships, especially the fragility and speed of connection in queer communities. In cities, intimacy can feel like fast consumption: intense, electric, but easily collapsing under fear, misunderstanding, or unspoken vulnerability. I’ve experienced relationships that were full of longing but built on unstable ground, where touch felt both urgent and impossible.
These experiences become metaphors in my machines’ gestures: movements that reach out but never fully connect, cycles that begin with desire and end in exhaustion, bodies that fight, worship, or lean toward each other but remain separated by invisible constraints.
To Touch, Barely, 2025
Temporary Rhizome 2024