“What can a body do?” — This question, posed by philosopher Baruch Spinoza in Ethics, challenges the common belief that the mind controls the body. For artist Beiyi Wang, this philosophical inquiry takes on particular urgency given their background as a former professional tennis player. In their work, this idea is revisited through a practice that interrogates the boundaries between physical experience and artistic expression, with an understanding of the body grounded in action and experience.
Beiyi’s athletic foundation informs their artistic practice, translating embodied knowledge of performance and precision into conceptual territory. Their early works were built on rigorous research, with art becoming a way to reconstruct the evaluative systems that had governed their physical experience.
In Self Gaze, Beiyi combined photography, collage, and nude self-portraits as a means of releasing anxiety: “Printing them was an act of release. They no longer belonged to me.” This act of externalization through image-making reveals how the camera operates as both mirror and barrier, simultaneously distancing the self and rendering it visible. Over time, Beiyi moved beyond graphic design and began working with installation, sound, performance, and food, each functioning as an organic extension of their ongoing inquiry into the body.
This tension between control and release manifests throughout Beiyi’s practice in a recurring visual metaphor: suspension. Beiyi’s works often present a suspended, swaying state. Handmade bagels hang from tree branches (Free Bagel Society); war-themed balloons float in the street (Autumn Snow); photographs dangle from fishing lines (Self Gaze). In this suspended state, objects become untethered from their usual contexts. This suspension operates as both formal strategy and conceptual metaphor, creating a “poetics of uncertainty” that resists fixed meaning yet sustains emotional resonance through its very instability.
While suspension creates distance and uncertainty, other works seek forms of reconnection. In Cocoonloo, they touch moist plants and dance instinctively within natural soundscapes, reconnecting body and emotions through nature. The familiar motions of tennis subtly resurface in their gestures, no longer pursuing “winning” but creating new relationships and states of being.
This search for new forms of connection extends beyond the physical into questions of cultural belonging. Born and raised in a Hui Muslim family that ran the halal restaurant Yiyuan Zhai for 26 years, Beiyi explores how cultural symbols shape and constrain identity through a practice they describe as “nomadic”—one that moves between geographies, traditions, and beliefs.
This exploration manifests powerfully in Echo of Signs, presented in the London exhibition Becoming of Memory (2025). The Shahada is transliterated into visual language and engraved on aluminum panels. With a gentle push, the metal trembles, awakening new echoes. The industrial material and laser-cut precision transform sacred text into something that can be reconsidered. Here, cultural symbols need neither complete inheritance nor total abandonment, but exist in states of perpetual renegotiation.
In Beiyi’s practice, the body reveals itself as a site of perpetual becoming. From the tennis court to the gallery, from sacred text to trembling metal, each work traces the path of transformation without arrival. What can a body do? Perhaps it can do precisely this: suspend itself between states, carry its histories while rewriting them, and find freedom not in resolution but in the grace of remaining in motion.
