| video installation , 15’21”
| concept & compose: Zen Lu | shooting & post-production: Zhao Fei
| “Shenzhen Times” Contemporary Art Exhibition: Urban Polyphony 2026 @MOCAUP
| Sonic City (Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, 2025)
| Contemporary Chinese Sound Art Exhibition (Chengdu Art Museum, China, 2023)
| 18th WRO Media Art Biennale (Wrocław, Poland, 2019)


“Bye Sick Zone” is a cross-media experiment by sound artist Zen Lu, using Shenzhen’s Baishizhou urban village as a “slice” to explore the interplay of sound and urban transformation. Through video and sound installations, the work documents the disappearance and rebirth of this “migrant enclave” amid the tidal wave of urbanization. Since 2012, Zen Lu has conducted extensive field recordings in Baishizhou urban village, deconstructing and reassembling its sonic fragments into abstract audio collages. These everyday sounds—both a “living archive” of the city’s fabric and an acoustic encoding of migrant collective memory—reflect the fragmented reality of globalization, where individual destinies hover in suspension.

Zen Lu conceptualizes sound as a tangible, evolving medium. The sounds of Baishizhou coalesce into a requiem for “disappearance,” echoing themes of migration explored in his 2010 collaboration with British director Isaac Julien on the film “Ten Thousand Waves (Better Life) ”. Both works interrogate the cost of pursuing “a better life” in modernity. The fragmented soundscapes in Farewell to Baishizhou mirror the physical erasure of alleyways by bulldozers, while the obscured micro-narratives of displaced communities are reconstructed through sound waves, creating an auditory utopia of memory. By “archaeologically” collecting and reinterpreting Baishizhou’s ambient noises, Zen Lu transforms sound into a weapon against oblivion. Noises once dismissed as urban clutter become keys to decoding the city’s memory. Multiscreen projections of migrating crowds and ruins, juxtaposed with the fluidity of sound, interrogate how modernity might rebuild fractured relationships between “humans” and “place.” This is not merely a farewell to an urban village but a pathological dissection of collective memory’s erosion in contemporary China’s urbanization.