Walking into FLOHAUS Gallery, the first thing visitors encounter is not a solid object but a quiet movement. Presented as an invited solo exhibition at FLOHAUS Gallery in New York, curated by Annie Chen, What the Body Keeps marks a continuation of Zhou’s recent exhibition activity across London, New York, and Los Angeles.
Working across installation and performance, Zhou’s practice explores the intersection of body, memory, and nonhuman life through material-based installations. Transparent balloons hover in the air, drifting gently as people walk through the room. Some rise slightly, others sway almost imperceptibly, as though responding to something invisible. Suspended by strands of human hair, the balloons seem to float weightlessly—fragile forms resembling lungs filled with breath.
This installation, Pssst, forms the centerpiece of Zoe Ze Zhou’s solo exhibition What the Body Keeps, a meditation on how the body stores memory, grief, and relational experience in ways that often escape language. The illusion is subtle but powerful. As viewers move through the gallery, the air currents generated by their bodies cause the balloons to shift and drift. The space becomes responsive, almost alive. Visitors moving through the space become active participants, shaping the work through their presence and movement.
The work suggests that breath—something fleeting and invisible—can still carry presence long after it leaves the body. For Zhou, the body is not a contained identity but a porous system shaped by relationships with other bodies, environments, and materials. Her work often uses organic matter—hair, plants, soil, and other fragile substances—to explore this entanglement between human and nonhuman life.
One of the most intimate works in the exhibition, Hair from You, consists of strands of the artist’s own hair hand-stitched into textiles. The project began after the death of Zhou’s father and has evolved over several years into an ongoing act of remembrance. Hair, carrying DNA yet separated from the living body, becomes both evidence and absence. Through slow and repetitive stitching, the artist transforms mourning into a material structure—memory literally woven into fabric. The work unfolds as a materially grounded exploration of memory, developing over time as part of an ongoing artistic inquiry.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Zhou extends this inquiry into ecological territory. In the performance work My Mouth as a Plant’s Pot, the human body becomes a host for plant life. By using her mouth as a vessel for growth, Zhou challenges the long-standing hierarchy that places humans above the natural world. The gesture proposes a more vulnerable and interdependent relationship with nature, one in which the body becomes part of a broader biological system.
Together, these works trace a quiet but profound shift—from control toward coexistence. The body, in Zhou’s practice, is never autonomous. It is shaped by grief, sustained by air, connected through touch, and entangled with the living world around it. This direction continues Zhou’s broader investigation into embodiment and interdependence, a line of inquiry that has been developed through her recent exhibitions in both the United States and internationally. Inside What the Body Keeps, breath moves through space, hair holds memory, and fragile materials reveal the invisible systems that bind us together.
At FLOHAUS Gallery, Zhou’s work reminds viewers that the body remembers more than we realize—and that even the smallest gestures of care can sustain the fragile networks that hold us in relation to one another. The exhibition situates Zhou’s work within an ongoing conversation around material practice and embodied experience.
