Yihao Zhang is a London-based installation artist whose practice probes the entangled dynamics of power, gender politics, and disciplinary systems. His practice draws on Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power, yet his work goes beyond visualising theory. Yihao Zhang weaves cold yet confrontational conversations through kinetic structures and industrial materials. His installations function as self-contained resistance mechanisms, simulating the way systems of control are inscribed upon, and internalised by, the human body through gesture and behaviour, making visible the passive deformation of the individual within institutional structures.
Silent Agitation marks Yihao Zhang’s first independent body of work presented in London. Informed by his firsthand experiences as a queer artist, the series offers a visual response to the pressure and disciplinary norms imposed on LGBTQ+ individuals. Having grown up in China—where legal protections are minimal and public discourse around queerness remains limited—Yihao is intimately familiar with how bodily expression becomes a target of silent surveillance. He reproduces these conditions through mechanical repetition and material symbolism, transforming the “disciplined body” into a performative apparatus.
Premiering in the group exhibition Into the Flux, curated by independent platform International Body of Art, Silent Agitation comprises four kinetic sculptures built from bird spikes, leather, motors, chains, and steel mesh. The series establishes a shared rhythm of agitation: swinging, rotating, colliding, and hammering, performed with unsettling precision inside an abandoned underground car park. Through a carefully orchestrated spatial layout, Yihao places the four sculptural systems in active dialogue with the architecture of the exhibition site. Their collective presence generating a soundscape of friction, repetition and mechanical rhythm, deliberately breaking down the divide between viewer and artwork. The audience is compelled to navigate obstructed paths, register threats, and experience psychological tension—pulled into the inner logic of the system not by invitation, but by necessity.
A two-metre-tall swaying sculpture—composed of leather, chains, and rolling bars—blocks the viewer’s path at the entrance. Drawing on ceremonial forms from ancient Chinese court processions, the structure operates as a moving barrier, converting symbolic authority into physical obstruction. Passing beneath its arc, viewers’ bodies are caught in its mechanical rhythm, turning their dignity into bodily subjugation. A rotating sculpture nearby, made of bird deterrent spikes, mimics a radar in constant scan mode—its hyper-vigilant motion suggesting an ambient threat demanding immediate attention.
Deeper in the space, two chain-bound machines confined within a rhomboid cage edge toward one another in endless confrontation—grinding, grappling, and tangling with no resolution as the viewer bears witness to an endless feedback loop of aggression. With the final fourth piece featuring a motorised hammer pounding against a circular metal mesh, each blow met with rebound. This cyclical motion offers no progression—only repetition—like a body trapped in a futile attempt to resist an unyielding system.
This simulation speaks not only to the condition of LGBTQ+ communities under regimes of social repression and self-surveillance, but also to the broader reality of body language in contemporary society: with emotional expression is stifled, gestures fragmented, and self-discipline a second nature. Through the language of machines, Yihao externalises this internalised violence, transforming abstract structures of control into an embodied performance.
At Into the Flux, Silent Agitation emerged as one of the most confrontational and physically affecting installations. Visitors found themselves scanned, blocked, and encircled—no longer autonomous observers, but active nodes within the system. Rather than providing an escape, Yihao Zhang offers exposure—laying bare the operations of control and implicating us within its circuitry. As he states, “I’m not interested in telling a story about escape. I want to build a space where the cage reveals how it functions.”
Words by Tom Edwards
Top image credit
Silent Agitation. Electric motor, bird spikes, iron chain, leather, iron cage, 400 x 200 x 200 cm, 2024
