At Flohaus Gallery in New York, Salome Yichi Zhang’s The Blue Left Spinning (2026) brings broken Qing dynasty blue-and-white porcelain inherited through her family into a moving sound installation. Zhang is a Chinese-Canadian composer and sound artist whose family has a long history of ceramic-making in China dating back to the Qing dynasty. The installation can be read through the experience of migration and displacement, but its strongest ideas emerge from what has physically happened to the porcelain: it has travelled, changed function, and entered a new technological structure while carrying the marks of its earlier life.
The shards come from the mountains outside Liling, in Hunan, where the ruins of Zhang’s family kilns remain. She drilled each piece and strung them onto a single adjustable post, so that the stack reads as a vessel assembled from parts that no longer fit one another. A motor at the opposite end of the installation drives three gears that wind a wire around a row of posts. The wire extends upward to a 3D-printed housing containing an ultrasonic sensor. Beside it are two sliding columns, with a counterweight travelling inside the inner column. As the wire pays out, the counterweight draws the housing downward; when the mechanism reverses, it carries the housing back upward. A time-of-flight sensor beneath the counterweight detects when it reaches the bottom, marking the end of each cycle. An Arduino Nano and motor driver mounted beneath the base control the sequence.
None of this is concealed. The wire, gears, and sliding counterweight remain visible, so the machine’s labour becomes part of what the viewer sees.
Leaving the porcelain visibly broken is one of the work’s most striking choices. Several plates are stacked vertically to suggest the shape of a vessel, while white cylindrical supports keep their rough edges apart and exposed. The unresolved form gives the sculpture’s rotation another association: the potter’s wheel. But Zhang reverses its usual logic. Rather than turning material towards a finished vessel, the mechanism sets an already broken one in motion. The fragments are brought together and made to rotate, but they are never restored to wholeness. The work returns to the process of making without pretending that the damage can be undone.
The sound produced by the sculpture gives these fractures another purpose. It is light, clear, and mostly high-pitched, punctuated by soft percussive clicks. Nothing ever strikes or touches the porcelain. As the sensor passes each plate, it measures the changing distance between itself and the irregular broken edge. Zhang’s program derives several streams of information from these measurements, including the distance itself and the ways that distance changes as the sensor moves. Five of these data streams are translated into sound, while a sixth registers the mechanism’s position within its cycle. The result is not simply a sonification of the porcelain’s shape, but a composition built from different aspects of its fracture.
When the sensor reaches the bottom, the movement pauses and the sound briefly disappears. The silence separates one reading from the next before the mechanism begins again. Because the edges are irregular and each cycle encounters them under changing conditions, no pass settles into exact repetition. The work does not suggest that a voice has been hidden inside the porcelain, waiting to be released. Instead, it measures the singularity of each break and turns those measurements into musical structure. What might normally be understood only as damage becomes the condition from which the work can continue.
Anna Ren’s projection translates the same fragments differently. With each reset, it alternates between a circle—the plate viewed from above—and the silhouette of a vessel, never settling on a completed form. Like the sound, the image is generated from information taken from the porcelain itself.
Yet the projection is less convincing than the sculpture. Its clean digital outlines make the fragments immediately readable as images, while the physical plates retain their rough edges, gaps, and visible separation. The projection represents fragmentation; the porcelain has to remain fragmented. This distinction matters. The physical object carries a history that the digital image can describe, but cannot fully reproduce.
There is, however, a gap between what can be experienced directly in the gallery and what becomes meaningful only once Zhang’s personal history is known. Without that context, the technology risks becoming the subject of the work. The viewer notices the rotating mechanism, electronic sound, and projection before understanding why these particular pieces of porcelain matter. The sculpture communicates movement, fracture, and displacement on its own, but its connection to Zhang’s family history is much less visible.
This is both a weakness and an interesting tension within The Blue Left Spinning. The work depends on biography, yet its physical language resists becoming merely illustrative of that biography. The porcelain is not presented as a sentimental family relic. Zhang drills into it, reorganises it, measures it, and subjects it to a mechanical cycle. Heritage is therefore not treated as something preserved intact, but as material that continues to change through movement.
For all the technology surrounding it, The Blue Left Spinning is most convincing when Zhang trusts the porcelain itself. Its broken edges, gaps, movement, and quiet sounds carry more weight than the shifting digital forms of the projection. The fragments acquire another life without recovering their old one. They return with every rotation, but never as an identical form or an identical sound.
Their inability to return to what they were is precisely what makes them such a compelling image of migration. Zhang does not repair the vessel or romanticise its fracture. She allows the broken porcelain to remain broken—and then asks what it can become from there.
Curated by Neil Leonard
Thesis Advisor: Ryan Page, PhD
Multimedia Projection: Anna Ren
About the Artist
Salome Yichi Zhang is an award-winning Chinese-Canadian composer and sound artist working across sound art, film, and music technology. In New York City, her multichannel and multimedia works have been presented at THE BLANC, Flohaus Gallery, and NYU’s Audio Lab, including work produced by Michael Schumacher. While studying in Boston, her work was presented at Cyber Arts Gallery, Emerson Media Art Studio, and Fenway Art Studio.
Zhang began her composition studies at the University of Toronto on a top-level scholarship before transferring to Berklee College of Music as a recipient of its World Tour Scholarship Award. She earned a B.M. in Electronic Production and Design and Film Scoring and was mentored by Neil Leonard at the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute. After graduation, she continued working with Leonard as his production assistant on Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy at THE BLANC.
She has contributed music and sound to independent features, television productions, and more than 20 short films and animations. She was one of the sound designers on Blue Planet Outside the Window, the first live-action 8K documentary filmed entirely in space, and contributed to Hope You Have a Good Trip, the final feature by internationally acclaimed Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, alongside projects with iQIYI and MIT’s Project Prakash. In 2025, her string quartet composition was featured on the Gaia Quartet’s Canadian tour and presented at the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto.