占韩波 · installation · 3D moving image · sculpture · wearable
Hanbo Zhan (b. Hangzhou, China) is a digital media artist based in London, working across installation, 3D moving image, sculpture and wearable forms.
His works build immersive, multi-sensory environments that move the audience from passive onlookers into active participants — binding physical gesture to digital response so that invisible computation acquires weight, mass and a place to stand in three-dimensional space.
His long-standing research follows the entanglement of technological development and the human condition: how increasingly sophisticated, increasingly invisible systems quietly redraw the boundaries of individual cognition.
OPERATING PRINCIPLE
I make work from the suspicion that the contemporary world is no longer something we inhabit, but something that inhabits us. The interfaces, screens, algorithms and devices we treat as tools have quietly become a second skin — a medium through which feeling, memory, intimacy and even resistance are processed before they are felt. My practice is an attempt to make that medium visible, and to test the points at which it fails.
I am drawn to the moments where a promise of liberation reveals itself, on closer inspection, as a more elegant cage. The promise of connection that delivers loneliness on demand. The promise of empowerment that arrives pre-packaged for consumption. The promise of truth that is engineered, sold, and measured. I do not approach these as problems to be solved but as conditions to be inhabited carefully, and described with precision.
Every system that claims to set the body free first asks the body to hold still and be measured.
My research orbits a cluster of questions that refuse to stay still: How does power write itself onto the nervous system when its mechanisms are no longer visible? What does authenticity mean inside a sealed loop of images that have only ever referred to other images? Whose body is allowed to be a body, and whose is reduced to data, code, or content? When the spectacle becomes the environment, where exactly is the spectator standing?
I borrow generously — from critical theory, from media archaeology, from cinema, from the underside of the internet, from the rituals and absurdities of everyday life. The work crosses between sculpture, moving image, simulation, and wearable forms because I believe these conditions are felt across registers — they are at once theoretical and somatic, infrastructural and intimate. To examine them in only one medium would be to repeat the very flattening I am trying to interrupt.
I am, perhaps stubbornly, not a pessimist. I think attention itself — slow, awkward, embodied attention — is already a form of refusal. I make objects and images that ask the viewer to stay slightly longer than is comfortable, to notice the seam between what they are being shown and what they have been taught to want. My role is not to provide an exit. It is to keep the question open, and to keep it beautiful enough that someone wants to live inside it for a while.