Second Skin
Naiyue Zhang
The project folds local, traditional Pulu fabric into envelopes, treating them as a medium that carries both distance and emotion. As fabric wraps the body while recording warmth, touch, and time, it becomes an intimate “second skin.”
These envelopes are linked together by cotton threads, between which hang transparent, fragmented words that form indecipherable sentences. These brief, scattered fragments fall from the letters, condensing blurred emotions left unsaid. Here, text relinquishes explicit meaning while preserving the power of writing itself as both a trace and an emotional vessel.
Relationships and distances are folded, carried, and answered—drifting into the gaps of rupture, omission, and untranslatability. Connection flows continuously, yet remains perpetually incomplete.
About the Artist: Naiyue Zhang
Naiyue Zhang is an artist born in Chongqing, China. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and is currently based in Shanghai. Her practice revolves around deep time, plant decolonization, and animism—tracing the remnants and transformations of human history to construct fictional narratives within the temporal and spatial gaps outside patriarchal discourse. Constantly venturing outdoors, she seeks possibilities for video, sound, poetry, sculpture, and photography beyond the white cube. By retracing emotional and bodily experiences, Zhang ventures deep into marginal zones within the fluid interstices of nature and urban environments, gradually establishing connections with ecology, ancient mythologies, and non-human entities.