10 Questions with Zhuyang Liu
Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine ISSUE18 | Featured Artist
Zhuyang Liu (b. Beijing, based in London) is a trans-media artist whose practice spans sound, performance, film, moving images, writing, and installation. Their work interrogates identity, labour, technocracy, and the body through immersive, often surreal narratives that blur boundaries between fiction and reality. Breaking the fourth wall is central to their approach, drawing audiences into absurd, darkly humorous, and densely layered worlds.
Zhuyang sparks dialogue around existence, politics, consumption, law, and collective life by intervening in public spaces with a mix of titillation and eerie precision. Superimposing daily urban experiences with transgressive fictional elements, their work thrives on contradiction, blending post-apocalyptic urgency with humour, joy, and excessive theatricality.
Zhuyang Liu - Portrait
HELMETING | Project Statement
In HELMETING, performers wear motorcycle helmets wrapped in human skin, reversed headphone systems, and stage surreal public acts, cooking, gambling, solving crimes, on buses and communal sites. This volatile interplay of sound, character, and space becomes a critique of biopolitics, labour, and performative environments. The film installation employs three main synchronized screens and a fourth screen visualizing sound data, disrupting cinematic structure while immersing viewers in a fractured yet cohesive reality.
As a Guzheng musician and composer, Liu’s sonic expertise shapes their aesthetic. In Bus, Rabbit and Chicken Soup (2023), a live performance on a moving bus fuses drag, poetic fragments, rabbits, and chicken soup into a surreal meditation on love, justice, and grotesque tenderness.
Their practice is often described as post/pre-apocalyptic, celebrating excess while exposing socio-political systems. Works like A Sperm with Shareholding... (2023) use speculative fiction to explore synthetic-organic boundaries and evolving control over the body.
Zhuyang’s hybrid works challenge perception, collapsing reality and fiction into multisensory experiences that question how we live, relate, and imagine.
AL-TIBA9 ART MAGAZINE ISSUE18
INTERVIEW
Can you share how your journey as an artist began? Were there specific moments or experiences in your early life that set you on this path?
Like many kids who loved art, I started with painting. As a teenager, I was drawn to the tension of colours and the physicality of the canvas. Growing up in a family with both literary and medical backgrounds, I can now see how this environment laid the foundation for my later interest in cross-disciplinary work. Before university, I worked in commercial film, directing advertising spots. That experience taught me how to use image, narrative, and rhythm to shape an audience's perception. But I quickly realised that film, for me, wasn't a closed discipline, it was a language that could keep transforming. It could merge with sound, space, performance, and text to create an open, interactive system. That realisation pushed me to explore intersections between different media and fields of research. At the time, I didn't even know what "art" was; I just started making things on my own until someone introduced me to the term "contemporary art."
Meanwhile, nourished at a young age by a virtuoso of the Guzheng Northern sect, I grew into a young guzheng soloist, later expanding my practice to become one of the few players of the xuanqin in China, as well as performing the Jing ethnic - duxianqin, the Japanese koto, and other plucked string instruments. Music and sound became vital ways for me to perceive the world, and in my work, I treat sound not only as a material, placed alongside others, but also as a social lens through which to construct a piece. I approach art with the logic of music, and music with the thinking of art, moving between media to discover points of connection and collision. I enjoy that sense of process, flow, and change.
HELMETING. A director called a bunch of performers to f_ck the work on public transport, cook and gamble their frequencies to solve a case, 4-screen synced video installation, film, variable size, 2024 © Zhuyang Liu
Your work spans sound, performance, film, writing, and installation. What led you to embrace such a trans-media approach, and how do these different forms interact within your practice?
I work in a project-based way, which means each piece could involve multiple media or just one. Often, the presentation of a work is only the beginning: the narrative continues in real-life contexts, triggering new events and leading to further experiments in form. My works exist both in the exhibition space and in the ongoing life of the world.
I see each medium as a different layer of the same organism I'm building. They're not simply parallel, they permeate each other in logic and rhythm. For example, I once staged a performance where a giant bear with a vinyl turntable "brain" was both protagonist and artwork, auctioned live on-site and successfully sold. In the work DAMP, I performed a dialogue during a traditional Chinese cupping therapy session, using a custom-made sound device: sensors mounted on the cups captured the skin's electrical signals, converting the formation of negative pressure, the seep of air, and the vibration of skin into real-time amplified and spatialised acoustic events.
This cross-media approach comes from my bodily experience as a musician, my background in sound technology research, and my interest in materials and linguistic symbols. The significance lies in freeing a work from being fixed to a single form or venue. It can seep into everyday life, into markets, entertainment venues, and subways, where it encounters new participants and contexts. These extensions often reshape the work itself, allowing it to grow through real-world feedback, spawning new performances, images, or sound installations, and stretching the lifespan of the narrative beyond the exhibition.
As you mention in your statement, your works blur the lines between fiction and reality, often creating surreal, immersive narratives. How did you come up with these concepts? And how do you actively apply them to your practice?
I sometimes joke that I have "aesthetic choice anxiety", I can't pick just one path, so I try to realise all the things I enjoy. This leads to a hybrid worldview where different media, logics, and contexts intertwine.
These concepts aren't defined from the outset, they emerge through long-term aesthetic practice and creative experimentation: exploring spatial perception, social behaviour patterns, the semantics of sound, and the blurred borders between daily life and staged performance. In my practice, surrealism is a methodology: allowing multiple realities to coexist without hierarchy, letting the audience drift through them as if wandering a city, turning a corner into a street both familiar and inexplicable, joyful absurdity, unexpected growth.
Clandestine Service, Installation view for Zhuyang’s solo exhibition at Chilli art project London, 2025 © Zhuyang Liu
The gourmet critics (in collaboration with artist Lil Soap), performance, 30mins, Jelly made brains, glasses, drumpad, mics, electronics, synthesizer, stereo sound, 2024 © Zhuyang Liu
Your work intervenes in public spaces, like markets, public transportation, and communal facilities. What interests you about these environments, and how do you approach them as artistic sites?
I'm drawn to the public nature of these spaces, their collective memory, social texture, and hidden intimacy. They are stages where private and public selves constantly collide.
My approach often involves functional estrangement, twisting the space's intended use into something unfamiliar. I'm interested in how pop culture, mass aesthetics, and fashion symbols exist within these environments, and how subtle shifts in context can challenge people's sense of normalcy.
For example, in the first edition of my platform, You Got a Room? How About at KTV!!!, we invited artists to occupy private karaoke rooms for instant creation. Together, we designed immersive environments where songs, decor, drinks, and the audience's own performances fused into absurd social stages, with each event archived as an industry-style data chart and London lifestyle record.
In these interventions, I might record sounds, transcribe conversations, or observe gestures, then distort them into soundscapes or performative texts. In HELMETING, headphones inside a helmet played edited recordings of everyday conversations; once stripped from their original context, they became uncanny. My video works often emerge from inviting participants into these sites for unscripted actions, later edited into layered narratives, a meta-story shaped by concept, improvisation, and atmosphere.
You engage with themes of labour, technocracy, and consumption. How does your work challenge or reframe these systems, and what questions do you want audiences to walk away with?
I prefer to construct parallel worlds, absorbing, dismantling, and recombining elements. These themes operate like the Earth's rotation: unnoticed, yet constantly shaping our lives. I focus on how they surface in everyday details, and re-stage them through absurdity, joy, and chance.
This perspective also comes from living between different cultures and languages, which continually exposes me to issues of identity politics, cultural capital distribution, the reproduction of global semantics, and the murky intersections between power, money, language, and the collective memory.
HELMETING. A director called a bunch of performers to f_ck the work on public transport, cook and gamble their frequencies to solve a case, 4-screen synced video installation, film, variable size, 2024 © Zhuyang Liu
Your pieces thrive on contradiction, combining post-apocalyptic urgency with humour, joy, and excess. How do you navigate these contrasts, and why is this interplay important to you?
I see these contrasts as different beats along the same rhythmic line, like the alternation of strong and weak beats in music. Contradiction isn't conflict; it's an ongoing dialogue between different symbols, materials, and bodies. They need to stay in motion to keep generating thought.
I'm fascinated by the tension of relative movement, small shifts that create sensory illusions, interpretive misalignments, or improvisation in communication. A slight delay, pitch bend, or change in texture can alter the entire context.
This method allows me to juxtapose multiple audio materials and perspectives, keeping meaning afloat and open. The audience is invited into a space with no single interpretation, immersed in the moment yet aware of their own role in perceiving it, finding new sensorial positions between the familiar and the strange.
Breaking the fourth wall is another key aspect of your art. What draws you to this approach, and how does it shape the audience's role in your work?
I've always explored a multi-dimensional worldview, questioning the mechanics of existence, life, tools, social ecologies, identity, function, law, and love, and reflecting on how artworks relate to the market and institutional systems.
I'm particularly interested in space, not only physical space, but also its social, psychological, systemic, and emotional intersections. In my work, the audience can be spectators, participants, or even co-creators.
For example, in Massage, I mounted multiple fascia guns on a wall, allowing the audience to decide how to interact entirely based on their own understanding and gestures. In the opening performance, I conducted a group of people making sounds while being massaged, blending vibration with mechanical noise into a "human effects processor" chorus. Here, the line between active and passive is blurred: are they massaging, or being massaged by the devices? When relative motion is reversed, who holds the agency? This dislocation creates a space for semantic and perceptual shifts.
Clandestine Service, Sound installation, multiple helmets with tattoos and electronics, space and work size variable, 2025 © Zhuyang Liu
HELMETING. A director called a bunch of performers to f_ck the work on public transport, cook and gamble their frequencies to solve a case, 4-screen synced video installation, film, variable size, 2024 © Zhuyang Liu
Sound and auditory textures play a crucial role in your installations. How do you use sound to shape the viewer's experience, and what role does it play in your storytelling?
For me, language and sound are together. Sound is not only a material, but also a social concept and a structural framework. It's deeply tied to my performances in free improvisation, free jazz, and experimental music. I explore the non-physical materiality of sound, its tactile qualities, elasticity, and its cultural, narrative, and textural manifestations within different social systems.
In recent projects, I've worked with spatialised sound, bone conduction, directional audio fields, and sensor-triggered systems to make the audience's body part of the acoustic circuit. Through a weaving of auditory sculpture, performative mechanisms, installation design, and perceptual research, I establish shifting dialogues between hearing and the body, making sound both an unreliable narrator and a disruptor of logic, injecting humour and absurdity.
Your art carries a sense of chaos, dark humour, and absurdity. Do you see humour as a form of resistance, and how does it function in your work?
Humour is a way of processing reality for me, to capture and state the present, a way to understand living and life. It exists in the act of staying alert while standing on unstable ground, observing and recording moments of contradiction, ambiguity, and illogic.
I often use the term "cruel optimism" to describe this state; "cruel" doesn't always mean harsh; sometimes it's about carrying romance into the unknown. It's like jazz: stubborn, unpredictable, a bit like an ex-lover. Like human emotion, to me, is a material with a temporal dimension.
I enjoy comedy and B-movies, embedding sharp reality inside absurdity, making people laugh and then feel the sting, or simply capturing that impulse of the moment. My starting point is often simple, I just want to make something playful and engaging. And yes, I laugh a lot while making it.
Lastly, are there any new themes, technologies, or artistic methods you're eager to explore in your future projects?
I'm developing a larger-scale wearable sound installation using non-standard materials, multiple performers, and interactive acoustic systems, integrating sculptural interfaces, bodily movement, and spatialised audio to create immersive environments that require complex technology and collective audience participation.
I'm also exploring the translation of biological and medical data into sound and visuals, transforming muscle tension, breathing rate, and brainwave signals into live audio, light, and electrical output. In material research, I want to combine new technologies to create uncanny, in-between forms, creatures that hover between human and animal, wrapped in "queer skin," roaming through comical landscapes, and intervening in the worlds of movement, fashion, and contemporary culture. And yes, hope I could do more writing this year!
Artist’s Talk
Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.
