Let the Fog Linger: The Science and Spark of Resonant Realms - Part 2
By Yuanya Feng
A Critical Review of the Exhibition:“ Symphony of Senses: The Resonance Between the Five Senses and the World”
Zhang Yinan, Endless Love, 2024, Courtesy the artist
The first work in the darkened section is Zhang Yinan’s video projection installation Endless Love (2024). On a raised platform stands an inverted acrylic pyramid, within which a projected animation loops endlessly, trapped in layered reflections. A meticulously crafted stop-motion figure repeats its movements in solitude, surrounded by a slightly unsettling soundtrack that radiates a mood of exhaustion and confinement. The animation carries the artist’s deep affection for the world, yet that passion, over time, becomes swollen with frustration under the everyday constraints of living abroad in Germany. Like the image reproducing itself endlessly within the prism, the once-pure love becomes an overwhelming presence, filling the transparent vessel to the point of suffocation.
Next, Lisa Chang Lee’s moving image work Silent Chorus (Fragment, Single-Screen Version) (2024) delivers an even more intense immersive audiovisual experience. The footage is drawn from a four-year anthropological and artistic research project titled Land Fragments, and was filmed entirely in the primal tropical rainforest of central Hainan Island of China. Using ultra-blue light, the film captures biofluorescent materials in the night—elements that lie beyond the range of human vision.
Lisa Chang Lee，Silent Chorus, “Symphony of Senses: The Resonance Between the Five Senses and the World”，2024 Future Lab
Vibrantly saturated plants and insects move in rhythm with the camera’s dance-like motions, visually synchronizing with a rich soundscape co-composed and mixed by Lisa Chang Lee and sound artist James Wilkie. This fluorescent dimension, invisible to the naked eye, exists in a liminal state—somewhere between presence and absence, like a spectral world running parallel to our own.
Embedded within the audio mix are traditional Li ethnic songs and legends, passed down orally without a written language. Like the biofluorescent materials imperceptible to the human eye, the Li language exists without a visible body, made manifest only through artistic intervention. To the artist, the Li language is part of the rainforest’s original voice—both a carrier of ethnic memory and auditory evidence of humans as part of the ecological web. This sensibility aligns deeply with the core theme of Symphony of Senses: that art is a profound mirror of the symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment.
The audiovisual climax of the darkroom section is NYSomeTimes’s music-projection installation Pulp Life (2024). Acrylic dot paintings on fabric are illuminated by dance music and projected visuals, transforming the gallery into a pulsating dance floor. This marks the conclusion of the exhibition’s “anti-thesis” section—the darkroom sequence that serves as a counterpoint to the earlier quiet, sensory nuance.
NYSomeTimes & Chaomo Studio & KK ZHANG，Pulp Life，“Symphony of Senses: The Resonance Between the Five Senses and the World”，2024 Future Lab
The third and final gallery, returning once again to a brightly lit space, brings the exhibition into its “synthesis.” It is here that two of the most expansive works—both in scale and intent—introduce the exhibition’s dual approach to empathy and symbiosis.
Zhang Yu’s performative painting-installation Fumigation – Detoxifying Elixir: Healing the Fog of Confusion (2024) focuses on interpersonal healing and human-to-human symbiosis. In contrast, Xu Ying’s immersive sound installation Symphony (2021) turns its attention to the fundamental essence of coexistence between humans and nature.
In Fumigation – Detoxifying Elixir: Healing the Fog of Confusion, clusters of Chinese medicinal herbs are spread across sheets of xuan paper, arranged in formation like Terracotta Warriors and left to undergo a seven-day fumigation process. Over time, the residue of the herbs seeps into the paper, and the materials begin to decompose and ferment, producing microorganisms. Thus, while the performance begins with the artist’s intervention, it is ultimately completed by the collaboration of plants and time.
The potent aroma of herbs and damp earth rises thickly in the air. With an ironic posture of “one formula to cure all ills,” the work becomes a metaphor for contemporary society’s collective psychological disorientation and ecological decay. Although the piece borrows the sensory language of traditional Chinese medicine, it does not aim for simple healing. Instead, it confronts social malaise with a pungent provocation—a sharp interrogation of collective mental health.
Zhang Yu，Fumigation – Detoxifying Elixir: Healing the Fog of Confusion, 2024, “Symphony of Senses: The Resonance Between the Five Senses and the World”，2024 Future Lab
Across the entire exhibition, there is an implicit thread of healing: through sensory engagement and participatory experience, the viewer is encouraged to reflect inward and to reconsider connections with self, others, and the external world. These artworks, through their multisensory and immersive strategies, carry the potential for therapeutic resonance.
A moment of unexpected healing also occurred during the installation of Endless Love: in the darkened room, the projected animation broke free from the confines of its acrylic pyramid, with the two animated figures escaping to dance across the surrounding walls and curtains. The curator interpreted this spontaneous visual “breakout” as a symbol of the artist Zhang Yinan’s inner breakthrough, offering it back to the artist as a gesture of blessing.
Though Detox Prescription delivers the sharpest and most critical note in the exhibition, it also enriches the exhibition’s subtle, underlying dimension of healing—one that is embedded in both the curatorial and creative processes.
The final work, Symphony (2021) by Xu Ying, brings together a variety of natural and synthetic materials placed into a system of kinetic sound-making devices. Through mechanical activation, the sounds of nature and artificial elements collide and converge, forming a symphonic landscape. As visitors move through the installation, surrounded by clusters of hay, they become physically immersed in the artist’s constructed environment—a landscape where human, nature, and machine merge. The body becomes the receiver of Symphony of Senses’s core message.
This experience parallels the sonic layering in Lisa Chang Lee’s Silent Chorus, where Li ethnic language is folded into the rainforest’s ambient recordings: two different works, echoing the same vision—an empathy born from sensory entanglement and ecological coexistence.
Xu Ying, Symphony, 2021, “Symphony of Senses: The Resonance Between the Five Senses and the World”，2024 Future Lab
The term “resonance” may consist of just two characters in Chinese (共感), yet its meanings unfold like a neural network—radiating outward in multiple, interconnected directions. Does it refer to the interaction and integration of the five human senses? Or to the shared sensory resonance between distinct individuals? Is it about the entanglement of external stimuli and internal perception, breaking down the binary of subject and object? Or the way a single external phenomenon, processed through a shared sensory system, can unite individuals and even evoke empathy?
The exhibition Symphony of Senses: The Resonance Between the Five Senses and the World takes a nearly three-part narrative structure. It does not aim to resolve these entangled questions, but instead renders the many possible states of “resonance” tangible through the field of art. Intellectual inquiry is wrapped in the richly textured, ever-shifting experiences of the artworks. The exhibition lets the fog linger—and within that fog, offers moments of comfort.
Perhaps future experiments in sensory-based art and curatorial practice could be even bolder, pushing more directly into the tensions and contradictions embedded in neuroaesthetics, where science and beauty collide. Such efforts could bring about a more immediate collision between the rational and the sensory. Still, Symphony of Senses lays an intriguing foundation for further exploration, and leaves us eager to see the future curatorial collaborations and experiments from Heart Lab and TRA Collective.
The Original Review is Posted on Future Lab in Chinese