Embodied observation, natural phenomena, white, and spherical shapes. Beiyi Wang’s practice operates within the realms of installation, performance, sound, and socially engaged work, but seems to be grounded and driven by something else. Based in London and Leeds, and holding a BA in Graphic Design and an MFA in Communication from Flagler College and the Royal College of Art, respectively, Wang approaches art as an extended inquiry into ritual and material encounters that can recalibrate the relationship between human bodies and their environments—the artist’s body and ours. Wang’s work is explicitly rooted in communication theories and “emergent encounters,” with projects that arise from direct, often rule-based engagement with sound, water, light, and touch. Throughout this practice, two formal tendencies recur with particular insistence: the use of white as a generative field, and a vocabulary of spherical and circular forms—pools, bubbles, beads, balloons, plates, shells, and calligraphic curves—that return in varied media and contexts, configuring a grammar that reappears across installations, performances, and sculptural works.
Wang’s biography informs the coherence of this grammar. A background as a tennis player and an explorer attentive to natural experiences feeds into a practice where the body is central, not as an image but as an instrument; the artist draws on the discipline of repeated movement and attunement to external conditions. The declared aim is to open spaces of healing and sensory awareness and to investigate how collective consciousness might be shaped by simple, shared rituals. Materials are chosen for their responsiveness rather than spectacle—water, sand, fabric, wood, glass, aluminum—and combined with sound and light to form environments that are as much procedural as they are spatial. Exhibitions in the United Kingdom, France, China, Rwanda, Canada, and the United States indicate a transnational circulation of these environments, yet the work remains closely tied to specific sites and the people who activate them.
One of Wang’s most recent projects, titled Fluid Whispers (2025), exemplifies the artist’s approach to installation and live performance from a nearly panoramic perspective. The work centers on a shallow, round pool filled with a small volume of water, installed within white drapery. The floor is covered in rings and constellations of blue sand; large bubbles descend into the space; and the performer, dressed in white, explores the environment throughout the action. Sound is not merely a backdrop but a structuring principle: droplets and composed music articulate the temporal arc and guide attention. In developing this project, Wang formulated a rule-based experiment that required participants to improvise and immerse themselves guided by sound, composed in collaboration with three other artists. The same logic underlies the performance environment: not the elimination of thought but a balanced tethering of attention to present sensory cues. Within the draped enclosure, sightlines are partial and mobile; the viewer must walk and re-position to glimpse different elements. The circular plan of the pool, the spheres of bubbles, and the dotted patterning of blue sand create iterative rhythms that echo a cycle of sound and silence. The title’s emphasis on fluidity and whispering describes both the materials and the mode of address: gentle, persistent, and immersive rather than declarative.
The concluding gesture of Fluid Whispers—the performer cutting and re-wrapping a section of the drape before leaving the pool—introduces a decisive but unadorned act of transformation. The environment is not left pristine; it records a trace of intervention. Wang has described the conceptual center of the project as “emptiness,” not as absence but as a state of still, open possibility like the attentiveness that can accompany bathing. The reflections of light on water emerged during the work’s development as another element to be pursued, expanding the project’s vocabulary of subtle, circular optical events. The environment is therefore provisional by design: the artist anticipates further cycles of activation, as well as integrated guidance for performers and audiences. The circular and spherical lexicon—pool, bubbles, dots—serves more than visual coherence; it provides a formal armature for sustained, cyclical attention, aligning material repetition with a ritual of presence in its emptiness.
If Fluid Whispers explores circles generated by water and sound, Moving through the beads (2024) reduces the circular unit to its minimalist form: the bead. Wooden beads threaded on fishing line lie on the floor, and over time, they lose their sequence as the line slackens and the chain disintegrates. The piece designates counting as a daily ritual of contemplation, explicitly naming the tracing of one sphere to the next as a way to dissolve restlessness. The work does not fix the chain but acknowledges entropy as part of the ritual’s reality; the beads’ eventual scatter is integral, not accidental. The choice of fishing line emphasizes transparency and fragility; the wooden spheres provide uniform tactility. In combination, they produce a structure that—like breath counting or rosary practice—relies on iterative touch and is inseparable from duration. The recurrent appearance of spherical elements in Wang’s practice is direct here. Each unit is a locus of attention, and the chain’s arc across the floor suggests cycles that are continuous but not permanent. The work’s material modesty is consistent with the larger aim of inviting the body into simple, sustained contact with matter.
A related vocabulary of spheres is also present in Cocoonloo (2022), an interactive sound installation featuring performance and printing components. Installed in a white kitchen interior that is softened by living grass, the work situates the performer among white wool spheres. The project’s starting point is the silkworm and the question of whether modern life might recover biological rhythms that high-speed civilization tends to disrupt—as if this kitchen has been retaken once more by green nature. Meditation and Zen frameworks are named as references, and the installation proposes the cocoon as a metaphor through which to pause and recalibrate. The whiteness of the space is not an erasure; it is the consistent field that enables the wool’s tactility and the grass’s color to register. Spherical wool forms echo the silkworm’s process while retaining their status as encounterable things rather than images. The performer’s body is neither passive nor dominant; it is situated among spheres that suggest protection and gestation. Here, as elsewhere in Wang’s work, the repetitive unit is an instrument for enabling different rhythms of attention.
White, in these works, is a constant. Drapes, clothing, paper, balloons, interiors, and plates often share a common, pale register. Wang’s description of “emptiness” clarifies why: white creates a receptive field for sensory events and small gestures. It operates as a threshold. Across projects, white is not purity but a condition for noticing; it allows the spheres, the water’s shimmer, and the sound’s modulation to hold attention. In installations that depend on present-tense sensory adjustment, such a field is functional: sightlines, depth, and highlight are all regulated through it.
In Autumn Snow: The Blanket of Messaging Forms in Times of War (2024), this field is applied to questions of communication and conflict. The work uses balloons, paper, graphics, and wood blocks to stage performances and installations in which white papers fall and move through space like snowflakes. The project begins with the observation that snowflakes are celebrated for their beauty and permanence in cultural representation, and that humans have invented snow globes to preserve this beauty. In times of war, by contrast, air-dropped leaflets—also white papers falling from the sky—participate in the transmission of propaganda and signal danger. Wang constructs a fictional world map that is deconstructed and episodically reconstructed, linking shifts in cartography with the changing vectors of wartime communication. The white paper retains its luminous neutrality even as it carries a traumatic load, serving as a counterweight and a refuge from the idyll.
The counterweight is a recurring strategy in Wang’s artistic thought process. Consider Side Dish (2024), a performance and ritualistic installation featuring a wooden table, a stool, musical eggs, wooden spheres that produce rattling noises, a bell, and a kinetic sculpture with more wooden spheres. Drawing on the artist’s upbringing in their parents’ restaurant—where the pace of cooking and eating framed food primarily as fuel—the work proposes a counter-environment. Conceived as a “side dish” to a meal, it sets conditions in which diners can slow down and attend to taste and texture.
Another striking performance-based video work with an occasionally surreal tone can be found in Today I had a meeting about the value with apple, stone, and matsutake (2023), which takes place on a draped table in which the sitter interacts and converses with an apple, a stone, and a matsutake mushroom across three chapters. The project is framed by a question about dialogue between humans and nature, without centering human agency. Biological systems are treated as social communities; matter and bacteria interact to produce their own value regimes. The performance examines how non-human organisms utilize resources as a means of engaging in discussions with “value” that transcends markets or human preferences.
Wang’s circular vocabulary also emerges from a more socially engaged, public setting, as is the case with Free Bagel Society: Exploring Societal Boundaries (2023). Here, bagels—rings of dough—are hung on round white paper plates suspended from trees by fishing line. The absurdity of a tree “growing” bagels is deliberate; yet, the work’s stated focus is on the relationship between social distance and amicability in urban life, as well as on how the distribution of free food exposes unexamined motives and habits. Wang asked each recipient why they took free food from a stranger; responses often admitted a lack of prior thought, suggesting that small gestures can reveal latent patterns of trust, need, and desire. The circular plate and the bagel’s ring form a precise continuation of Wang’s lexicon: simple, repetitive forms configured for exchange rather than contemplation. Suspension recurs as well: objects hang, sway, and wait for activation by passing bodies. The project remains true to the larger practice by valuing participatory encounter and by choosing materials that communicate without didacticism.
The everyday and the ready-made hold a central position in her sculptural practice. Seashell (2024) translates the familiar into sculptural form by suspending an aluminum and glass shell from a metal string. The suspension mechanism again prepares the object to meet a body; it hovers at a height and registers slight motion. The material choice of aluminum and glass is consistent with the practice’s interest in reflective surfaces and precise edges, yielding a surface that catches and reflects light, volatile and ephemeral.
Another example can be found in the negotiation of cultural symbols in Echo of Signs (2025). In Echo of Signs, Wang transliterates the phonetic elements of the Shahada—a text that has surrounded the artist since childhood—into a visual language and cuts that language into aluminum. The industrial material, the precision of laser cutting, and the suspension of the piece hanging from the ceiling or a cut-out of traditional calligraphic forms and pasted into contemporary exhibition conditions. The artist notes that, upon contact, the collisions of metal awaken sleeping sounds; the work is not a silent script but a resonant object. The suspension keeps the text in a state of slight motion, inviting viewers to attend not only to form but also to the sonic and tactile dimensions of the material. Importantly, the project is described as a reexamination of a cultural code. Wang names this as a way to preserve cultural memory, while acknowledging that meaning is neither a fixed inheritance nor a total abandonment.
Wang situates this vocabulary within a biographical frame that includes a nomadic orientation and a Hui Muslim upbringing in a family that ran the halal restaurant “Yiyuan Zhai” for twenty-six years. These facts matter insofar as they clarify why communication, ritual, and symbol recur in the work, and why the artist stages code as something to be examined and reconfigured. Lixin is me (2022), for example, uses print, 3D modeling, and fabric to suspend calligraphic-looking lines as sculptural forms; the project explicitly considers the future state of a de-religious cultural continuity.
Earlier projects illuminate how this method develops from the artist’s own image-work. Self Gaze (2021) uses photography, collage, mirror, and magazine fragments to assemble a composite portrait from parts—the artist’s cropped eye, a hairline, a nipple—and extends the assemblage through contributions gathered by open call. The aim is to challenge the external and internal scrutiny directed at women’s bodies and to propose “self-gazing” as a practice of acceptance. In this project, Wang utilizes an editorial and graphic skill set to explore questions of ownership and image circulation; printing becomes a means of release from anxiety rather than a means of accumulating self-possession. Although less site-responsive than later installations, Self Gaze shares interest in the partial view, the suspended fragment, and the role of simple materials (string, paper, reflective surface) in organizing our perception.
Methodologically, Wang’s projects are clear about how they proceed. Rules are proposed; sensory cues are coordinated; environments are built at a human scale. Across these works, the importance of white and of spherical or circular forms is neither incidental nor purely stylistic. White enacts a condition of perceptual readiness, and it threads the versatility of Wang’s practice with a consistent sense of threshold. Circles, spheres, and curves—bubbles, beads, balloons, bagels, shells, calligraphic strokes—provide a unit of iteration that supports rituals of counting, listening, bathing, and gentle exchange. Suspension integrates these two: spheres and scripts are purposely hung or loosely tethered to transmit movement, light, and sound.
At the same time, Wang’s projects that draw on specific cultural symbols, such as the Shahada, state their purpose with clarity: not to reproduce a symbol intact nor to erase it, but to test how material translation can preserve memory while loosening fixed meanings. Wang’s projects explicitly address healing, sensory awareness, and the recalibration of attention—concerns that are widely shared in contemporary life. They do so through accessible, low-barrier rituals, such as bathing, counting, listening, offering food, touching a shell, and pushing a piece of metal to hear its resonance.
Across the body of work, what stands out is the disciplined economy of means and the precise alignment between declared aims and formal choices. In each case, the elements—water, sand, wool, beads, balloons, shells, plates, aluminum—have been selected because they are legible, responsive, and capable of carrying a ritual without forsaking accessibility. Beiyi Wang’s practice builds environments for attentiveness and proposes simple, repeatable rituals that foreground how bodies meet phenomena and how symbols can be re-materialized. As such, they maintain an academic clarity about their procedures and aims while remaining open to the emergent, collective experience that activates them.
Last Updated on October 4, 2025
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About the author:
Maxim Foucquet is a curator, art critic, and contemporary artist residing and working in Belgium.
