| sound installtion | 2025
| Sonic City Sound Art Exhibition 2025 @Pingshan Art Museum
| Open M Art Fair 2025 @ G&G创意社区

The City and People in the Soundscape: Artistic Practice and Social Inquiry in Zen Lu’s “Bye Sick Zone” Project

As a sound artist long rooted in Shenzhen, Zen Lu has always taken “sound” as a probe to build a bridge between experimental expression and social observation. His artistic foundation is deeply rooted in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary sound art and experimental music—not only inheriting the respect for “authentic environmental sounds” from field recording, but also incorporating the thinking of deconstructing and reconstructing sound textures from experimental music. He excels at transforming intangible auditory experiences into physical narratives that carry social memories through the capture, arrangement, and installation-based presentation of sound. From he participation in the sound experiment sessions of the exhibition Topologies of the Real (where he created intermedia dialogue with contemporary artworks through “reconstruction” techniques) to his long-term in-depth creation focused on Baishizhou Urban Village, Zen Lu has consistently used sound as a medium to explore the complex connections between individuals and urban spaces. His works combine experimental auditory aesthetics with profound humanistic care.

Since 2012, Baishizhou—a typical urban village in Shenzhen—has become the core field of Zen Lu’s artistic research. Based on over a decade of field recordings, he has broken the boundaries of traditional sound creation by integrating the “observation of group behavior” from sociology, “preservation of cultural memory” from anthropology, and “analysis of spatial power” from political economy into the fabric of his creation, thus establishing a unique “sound archaeology” methodology. This creative approach is not merely simple sound collection; rather, through systematic recording of the daily soundscapes of the urban village—such as the cries of vendors, dialectal conversations of tenants, the hustle and bustle of street markets, and the roar of demolition machinery—he transforms the migration trajectories of migrant populations and the process of urban renewal in Baishizhou into perceivable auditory archives. As he shared at the “Sonic City Sound Art Exhibition,” these sounds are not just records of physical phenomena, but “direct evidence of the impact of urbanization on community ecosystems.”

In 2019, Zen Lu’s video installation “Bye Sick Zone” was exhibited at the 18th WRO Media Art Biennale in Poland, marking the first important presentation of his Baishizhou project. With “the human dimension” as its core theme, the biennale focuses on the complex relationships between humans, media, and society in the post-technological era—and Lu’s work precisely addresses this theme. Through the simultaneous presentation of video footage and field recordings, he transformed Baishizhou’s soundscapes into a cross-regional cultural dialogue. In the work, the dense living spaces and diverse sound samples form a strong intertextuality, which not only demonstrates the inclusive nature of Baishizhou as a “urban foothold” for migrant populations, but also implies the survival tension under spatial compression. This attempt to place “local soundscapes” in the context of international media art not only brings the individual stories of Baishizhou into the perspective of a global vision, but also confirms the unique value of sound art as a “cross-cultural communication medium.”

In 2025, Zen Lu was invited to participate in the “Sonic City Sound Art Exhibition” at Pingshan Art Museum, where he created the sound installation “Bye Sick Zone“, deepening and extending his Baishizhou project. Centered on the topic of “urban renewal and sound narration,” the exhibition saw Zen Lu’s work refine the previous audio-visual integrated narration into a pure auditory experience through a more focused sound expression. Compared with the 2019 video installation, the new work weakens the guiding nature of visuals; instead, through multi-channel layout and sophisticated arrangement of sound layers, it allows the audience to immerse themselves in the “sound timeline” of Baishizhou—from the hustle and bustle of the early years to the silence after urban renewal. The evolution of sound serves as a direct footnote to the changes in urban space. This creative shift not only responds to the core view of soundscape theory that “sound is a carrier of spatial memory,” but also reflects Zen Lu’s profound grasp of the characteristics of sound as a medium: compared with the intuitiveness of visuals, sound is more capable of evoking the audience’s emotional resonance and memory associations.

In terms of creative techniques, Zen Lu skillfully uses “sound arrangement” and “power metaphor” to endow his works with strong speculativeness. This feature was already evident in the video installation “Bye Sick Zone” (created in collaboration with Zhao Fei)—by transforming an abandoned letterbox and integrating new and old media such as LCD screens and CD players, he turned a physical object into a carrier of sound narration. In “Bye Sick Zone,” this technique is further enhanced: the work uses the dynamic changes in sound intensity to construct a narrative arc, where the dense street recordings in the early part form a sharp contrast with the tranquility of Bye Sick Zone at the end. This contrast is not merely an auditory design, but an artistic translation of the evolution of “sound power.” As the theory of sound power reveals, the intensity and type of sound in public spaces directly reflect the evolution of power structures. The transformation of Baishizhou from a “diverse sound field” to a “silent space” essentially metaphorizes the dissolution of the discourse power of migrant populations and the dominance of capital logic in urban renewal. Through sound, Zen Lu transforms this intangible evolution of power into a perceivable artistic experience.

Notably, Zen Lu’s creation has always maintained a balance between the dual identities of “participant” and “observer.” As a creator who has lived in Shenzhen for a long time, his emotional investment in Baishizhou endows his works with humanistic warmth; as a practitioner in the field of sound art, his professional fieldwork methods and experimental spirit ensure the academic depth of his works. This balance distinguishes his works from pure sociological research (avoiding the coldness of dataization) and from generalized artistic expression (breaking away from the emptiness of emotionalization). From its international debut at the WRO Biennale to its in-depth localization at “Sonic City,” Zen Lu’s Baishizhou project has formed a complete “sound narrative system.” It not only preserves a precious auditory archive of Shenzhen’s urban renewal process, but also expands the practical path for sound art to engage with social issues.

Against the backdrop of the accelerated iteration of contemporary cities, Zen Lu’s Baishizhou project carries distinctive contemporary significance. He has proven that sound art can not only create pure auditory aesthetics, but also serve as an important medium for recording history and reflecting on society. The captured street sounds are not only imprints of the survival of migrant populations, but also vivid footnotes to urban development; meanwhile, the ebb and flow as well as transformation of sounds in his works provide a unique auditory perspective for understanding power relations in urban spaces. As Pingshan Art Museum commented on his work, Zen Lu has built “an urban archive mediated by sound.” This archive not only preserves Baishizhou’s past, but also uses art to question the future development direction of cities: in the process of pursuing modernization, how should we preserve the “sound heritage” that carries individual memories and community warmth?