Zoe Ze Zhou: What the Body Keeps
FLOHAUS Gallery is pleased to present What the Body Keeps, a solo exhibition by multimedia artist Zoe Ze Zhou, on view at the gallery’s Midtown Manhattan space from March 13 through March 15. The exhibition brings together a body of work spanning installation, performance, and material-based sculpture, marking the artist’s first presentation in NYC with FLOHAUS Gallery.
Through her practice, Zhou investigates the porous boundary between the human body and the nonhuman world. Working with organic materials such as hair, plants, soil, and other fragile substances, she constructs environments where the body is no longer positioned as dominant, but as vulnerable, permeable, and entangled with surrounding systems. Across installation, performance, and sculptural works, Zhou examines how memory, grief, and ecological relationships are carried and stored within the body, often in ways that exist beyond language.
A central thread in Zhou’s work is her long-term project Hair from You, in which she hand-stitches strands of her own hair into textiles. Hair, containing DNA yet detached from the living body, functions simultaneously as presence and absence. Through slow and repetitive labor, the work transforms personal mourning into a physical structure that accumulates over time. In parallel works such as My Mouth as a Plant’s Pot, Zhou further repositions the body as a vessel rather than an authority, allowing plant life to grow from within the human body and questioning anthropocentric hierarchies between humans and the natural world.
At the center of the exhibition is the installation Pssst, composed of transparent balloons suspended by strands of human hair. The balloons resemble delicate lungs, appearing to float in midair as if holding the invisible trace of breath once exhaled from the body. As viewers move through the gallery, the air currents generated by their movement cause the balloons to drift and shift, creating a subtle choreography between bodies and space. Through this fragile system of movement, Zhou reflects on the vulnerability of human relationships and the care required to sustain emotional and ecological connections.
Zoe Ze Zhou is a multimedia artist working across installation, performance, and material-based sculpture. Her work explores the intersection of embodiment, ecology, and relational ethics through organic materials and living systems. Zhou has exhibited internationally, including presentations at London Contemporary Art Fair, Ocean Space in California, and galleries in New York and London. She currently lives and works between the United States and China.
