SALOME YICHI ZHANG: THE BLUE LEFT SPINNING
August 14–15, 2026
FLOHAUS Gallery, New York
Curated by Neil Leonard, with guest multimedia visual artist Anna Ren
FLOHAUS Gallery is pleased to present The Blue Left Spinning, a solo presentation by Chinese-Canadian composer and sound artist Salome Yichi Zhang, on view August 14–15, 2026. Curated by Neil Leonard, the two-day presentation centers on Zhang’s audio-visual sculptural installation The Blue Left Spinning (2026), with guest multimedia visual artist Anna Ren.
Working with Qing Dynasty blue-and-white porcelain fragments inherited through her own family line of ceramicists, Zhang transforms an object associated with preservation, inheritance, and stillness into a continuously evolving instrument of movement and sound. Blue-and-white porcelain was never meant to move: it was made to sit, to hold, and to be handed down intact. Zhang begins instead with what did not survive that familiar transfer—broken fragments—and considers how an inherited object might acquire another life through technological and sonic transformation.
Constructed from Qing Dynasty porcelain fragments, steel, 3D-printed components, stepper motors, sensors, custom software, and synthesizers, The Blue Left Spinning places the ceramic shards into slow, continuous rotation. The movement recalls the hands that once shaped and handled porcelain across generations, while sensors translate the sculpture’s changing physical position into data that activates a five-voice resonator synthesizer.
The resulting sound is not a recording of the original ceramic, nor does it follow a conventional musical composition or predetermined score. Instead, Zhang creates a speculative sonic model of the porcelain, an imagined response to the resonant frequencies and material memory of fragments altered through breakage. As the sculpture turns, its physical form continuously generates new sonic relationships. The work has no fixed duration and no exact repetition; its slow blue rotation never presents itself in precisely the same way twice.
Through this ongoing exchange between material, movement, and sound, broken ceramic no longer rests in silence. The fragments become both sculptural material and instrument, creating a space in which acts of looking and listening unfold simultaneously. The Blue Left Spinning considers inheritance not as the preservation of an object in an unchanged state, but as a process of rupture, translation, and reactivation—asking what can remain, and what new forms can emerge, when an inherited object is allowed to move again.
About the Artist
Salome Yichi Zhang is an award-winning Chinese-Canadian composer and sound artist working across sound art, film, and music technology. Her work has been presented in galleries and art spaces in Boston and New York, including Cyber Arts Gallery, The Blanc, Emerson Media Art Studio, Fenway Art Studio, and the Diapason Sound Art Archive at NYU.
Zhang began her composition studies at the University of Toronto, where she received the program’s highest entrance scholarship, before transferring to Berklee College of Music as a World Tour Scholarship recipient. At Berklee, she studied Electronic Production and Design, Film Scoring, and creative coding. She has contributed music and sound to independent features, television productions, national media projects, and more than 20 short films and animations. Her credits include Hope You Have a Good Trip, the final feature by internationally acclaimed Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, alongside projects with China Central Television, Xinhua News Agency, iQIYI, and MIT’s Project Prakash. Her concert music has toured Canada and been presented at the Canadian Music Centre.
