WHITE BEAR: Dream 01, 2026
Moving Image｜ Installation
In the patriarchal heterotopia named "White Bear," language and faith are replaced by invisible frequencies. This is not merely a geographical space, but a technology-driven ideological expansion —TechGnosis. Here, technology usurps the divine role; "White Bear Radio" is no longer a concrete medium, but a pervasive environmental force. This environmental force no longer manifests as rigid repression, but as an eternally evolving parasitism. "White Bear" evolves here into a "super-organism" that devours everything in its surroundings. "Order" is not the final goal, but the means and the mode of co-option. Ultimately, the inorganic and the organic merge completely. Individuals are dissolved, collapsing instead into parts or organs within the Great Machine. This growth is geographical and sprawling; though driven by discipline, it presents a systematic chaos that expands like cancer cells.
WHITE BEAR: Dream 01 (installation view), Level 2, Studio Building, RCA, London, UK, 2026
White Bear: Dream 01 focuses on the construction of childhood disciplinary systems and the logic of punishment. By mobilizing the architectural vocabulary and auditory memories of early education, the dream presents a power structure that is ostensibly "playful" yet remains highly rigorous.
Utilizing Freud's logic of "Condensation & Displacement," the dream demonstrates how vitality (tree) evolves and reorganizes into mechanical components within chaotic space-time. However, this transformation is not a linear, binary substitution, but rather a process of hybridization and devouring: plant roots entangle with cables and gears, and mechanical scaffolds exhibit a skeletal rhythm. "Spontaneous domestication" results in the "dissolution of the individual," which eventually merges into an "inorganic body," subsequently forming a massive, breathing "educational organ." Although this growth remains under the surveillance of patriarchal frequencies, its excessive expansion produces a visual sense of profound eeriness and geographical disorder.
WHITE BEAR: Dream 01 (installation view: Single-channel digital video, 4:3, HD), 03min30sec, HD 1920×1080, 2026
AESTHETICS: Dreamcore & The Glossy Uncanny
Visually, Dream 01 adopts "Dreamcore" and occupied "liminal spaces", filled with a nostalgic retroist hauntological atmosphere. Amidst vibrant, dazzling technicolors, the audience becomes lost in a surreal labyrinth composed of classrooms and corridors. The imagery utilizes a 3D Glossy / Plastic Aesthetic. This clay-like, synthetic texture with a cheap industrial gloss reinforces the world's "unreality" and sense of being manipulated. It blurs the boundaries between living organisms and synthetics, endowing the originally horrific process of "merging" with a doll-like, playful, and absurd sense of artificiality.
The spatial narrative employs a First-person Perspective, one-shot recursive structure. The lens acts like an instrument inspecting the interior of intestines or an assembly line; under the obsessive-compulsive guidance of a centrally symmetrical composition, the audience is forced to confront the vertigo of being "consumed by the system." The entire creative process utilizes AI's algorithmic uncertainty to simulate this "organic, disordered growth." From keyframe storyboards to the recursive editing of video generation, the visual Artifacts produced during the AI generation process correspond precisely to the logics of metaphor and metonymy within the dream.
WHITE BEAR: Dream 01, 03min45sec, HD 1920×1080, 2026
HETEROTOPIA, 2026
Lingyi’s Work in HETEROTOPIA (group exhibition, exhibition view), Stairwell, Ground floor, Studio Building, RCA, London, UK, 2026
The transitional space at the base of this concrete stairwell is pleased to present Heterotopia, a multi-layered site-specific installation that showcases new work from Netta Rabinovitch, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Siyuan Wu and Lingyi Zhang. Bringing together drawings, sculpture, animation and video, this exhibition surfaces four dreamlike alter-realities responding to specific but interlinked concerns.