Yutong Zhang
Yutong Zhang (oooootoooooy) is a multimedia artist. Their practice examines decentralized systems of human perception and how they manifest through objects, emotions, and social relations. Their performances draw from bodily movement, situational storytelling, and meditative states, merging tangible realities with abstract sensations to create ambient site.
Two-month residency at Zvjezdane Staze as one of three Artists in Residence selected for the first edition of TEREN_SЛОЈЕVИ.
Concept
Water carries what land tries to forget.
I came to this understanding through my previous performance Overflow-Water (Linz, 2025), where natural materials collected from my life history were run through live feedback circuits and real-time audio capture, becoming an ambient live performance. The work ended in a meditation on water not as metaphor, but as a medium that holds reflection, memory, and the body of human experience.
When I read the framework of TEREN_SЛОЈЕVИ · Sound / Extraction / Memory, I began researching the region. The Vareš municipality sits within a watershed feeding thousands of people downstream, while silver, lead, and zinc are being extracted nearby. This is not a historical condition. It is ongoing. Water is moving now, carrying dissolved material through the valley, beneath Bobovac, past Mijakovići, and further downstream. I want to listen to this movement through sound.
My interest lies in the relationship between material composition and sonic transformation. I want to research the components of water, its mineral content, its material states, and how these conditions relate to the surrounding environment. What matters is not the object itself, but how it behaves as a system that can be translated into sound.
My development is about how, through the passage of time, non-human media can become sonic agents, generating a spatial and environmental field where listening is no longer passive, but a physical condition shaped by materials, duration, and change. Sound arises when objects, environments, and bodies are placed into slow temporal relation.
Work in progress
Photographs · Yutong Zhang and Belma Bešlić-Gál
Selected exhibitions
Selected performances
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TEREN_SЛОЈЕVИ⁰⁰¹·Δ26 is funded by the European Union under the Culture Moves Europe programme, implemented by the Goethe-Institut. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Goethe-Institut. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.