What has transformed the view from this window? Curtains act as the veils that carve private and public space. The curtain becomes a palimpsest of stories whispered by hair's delicate threads. An enigma of access—us and others, who treads close, who is allowed to touch our hair ? The curtain was crafted in 2023 in Xuchang, a Chinese city famous for making wigs. Zhang worked for 20 days in a wig factory, herself, alongside 40 female co-workers or ‘sisters’, as they affectionately called one another. Sister Li in particular was instrumental in the fabrication of this curtain which stretches to the machine’s limits. Seen through a patriarchal lens, the length of hair becomes intertwined with binary and rigid beauty standards.

Simultaneously, hair, a conduit of mystic traditions across culture. The artist ponders what occurs when her co-workers were putting these magical touches on the hair day in and day out. What kind of spells are in effect ? What witchcraft lingers in each strand ?

The performance of Yi Zhang The Weight of a Stone (2022) , presented for the second edition of ‘Parade, the public event’ speaks to The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. In this absurdist text, Camus states that, “The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy".

The village of Saint-Cirq Lapopie is built of stone whilst natural elements such as wind and rain put people in a similar predicament to Sisyphus. Through her ​​ephemeral performance, Zhang lifts the stones, lets them fall and then crack, before picking them up again until they are too broken and too small to break further. In doing so, she demonstrates that the process of chasing the stone down the hill serves as an opportunity for Sisyphus to take a break from the process and make decisions again; Sisyphus chooses to keep pushing the stone each time.