The artist’s exploration of maritime history and global capital is animated by currents of death and eroticism
Aranya is a private new-town resort near the Northeastern Chinese city of Beidaihe, Hebei province, an upmarket getaway for city-dwellers just a few hours by bullet train out of Beijing. It’s also home to the Aranya Art Center, an idiosyncratic institution set in the midst of this luxury lifestyle development. With a picturesque artificial beach (its sands were brought in from another province), the area is otherwise known for hosting the storied summer homes of senior Communist Party cadres, while nearby Qinhuangdao is one of China’s largest coal ports. It is in this heady brew of politics, mirage and geology that Payne Zhu stages his solo exhibition Sounding the Deep Water, an allegorical meditation on the seaborne history of global capital as its locus shifted from Mediterranean mercantilism and Atlanticist finance to, lately, the great power tensions in the Pacific.
Sounding unfolds over two spaces and three interlinked bodies of works. In the first space, the building’s circular, open-air amphitheatre, sits Whale-Derived Pump (2025), a large painted sail on a steel mast, which rotates gently with the wind. The oilskin cloth of the sail is made of an algae-derived biomaterial, a translucent vegetal green, and painted in pigments using fish oil. In glazed brown and green panels reminiscent of stained glass, the sail depicts a writhing deep-sea leviathan, a tangle of tentacle, beak and jaw with a huge glistening eye, silent and solemn. On closer inspection, it is a struggle between a sperm whale and a giant squid, and the eye belongs to the squid, which is being swallowed whole. Zhu’s work often deals in allegorical gestures at operatic scales, creating a fine patina between grand histories and quaint particularities. The materials of Whale-Derived Pump nod to the whaling era of American capitalism – at one point whale oil composed half of all exports from the colonies to Great Britain – as well as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), casting the creature as an ambassador of unthinkable depths, a counterpart to the trade lines all too easily drawn across the ocean surface.
Moreover, as Zhu insists in an interview, the whale is itself a trader in the marine ecosystem, redistributing nutrients and energy by traversing its strata. Set at the centre of Aranya’s spiral structure, under the theatre’s blowhole oculus, the sail seems to offer up the whole building as a cetacean carcass. The second space, an installation partially adapted from Zhu’s 2023 presentation at the Shanghai Biennale, features two works set within burgundy walls and gold-trimmed art deco lighting fixtures that imitate early-twentieth-century Shanghai, when the colonial grandeur and cosmopolitan stylings of China’s commercial hub made it the ‘Paris of the East’. In four corners on black plinths are ‘dishes’ designed by the artist, small sculptural delicacies that reference the commodities that made globalisation, such as coal, spice, porcelain, fish. These works are as exquisite as they are enigmatic. Kailuan Coal in the Ripples of the Lotus (2025) features a cowrie shell with cat whiskers standing salaciously like the stamen of a flower, atop a carbonised lotus leaf. Another, Floating Secretions (From a Sperm Whale) (2025), features a porcelain vessel laminated with squid membrane, dried in a dark glaze.
At the centre of the space is a two-channel video, Promises from the Futures (2025 Derivative Edition) (2025). Sharing a soundscape of partially AI-generated whale-song, the twinned channels are projected on each side of a wooden frame and can never be seen simultaneously.
The first comprises handheld footage that traces a dreamlike sequence of global trading ports. In gliding, petroleum jelly-smeared shots of the coast from aboard a moving vessel, we see containers, harbour structures, oil rigs and LNG storage on the shores of Rotterdam, Geneva, Venice, Shanghai and London. Their infrastructures blur into one as we glimpse between picturesque alpine ranges, fragile Venetian stilts and the unmistakable scale of contemporary China.
In the video’s second channel, two bearded men aboard a fishing boat – the artist and his double – barely speak a word, save for the occasional subtitled exchange in a mumbled, indeterminate language, neither Mandarin nor English. The segment is shot in voyeuristic night-vision, its phosphorescent highlights redolent of the green lamps used by fishermen to lure squid. Living on a boat, they tenderly light cigarettes, lather one another in the shower and fall asleep in each other’s arms. One plays the commodity and the other, the derivative, a financial instrument whose value is tethered to the price fluctuations of the commodity it shadows. The former grounds a material value, the latter lubricates its exchange in time. Sat together, they gnaw on fried fish in a Beckettian silence, accompanied only by the ASMR of lips smacking. They are headed, one subtitle discloses, to a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland, where Zhu’s character – the derivative, according to the exhibition text – will take his life. Whether or not the conceit works – of a commodity encountering its derivative, spending a last night together before the latter’s sacrifice – there is a chemistry between the couple adrift, embodying twinned abstractions whose dance has animated the movement of capital through time and space.
Sounding the Deep Water is a strange, rhizomatic show woven from the threads of imperial geography, financial history, ecological hauntings and industrial metabolism. Its historical motifs are indebted to historian Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism (1967), a magisterial study of the movement of ‘world-economies’ from Venice to Holland to England throughout the last millennium, shifting again today to the great power competition between China and the US across the Pacific. While the show is at times dreamily allegorical, at other times a deceptively simple detail – a seashell, an art-deco light – sends one spiralling through networks of semiosis that lace the surface of a combined and uneven global system, as well as its possible other lives.
The sprawling dramaturgy of Zhu’s story of capital is animated by more baroque currents of sex, death and voyeurism, figuring the history of modernity as a nature morte. ‘Sounding’, he reminds us in an interview, is a way of probing an unknown depth, as well as an obscure sexual practice of pleasure derived from inserting objects into the male urethra. For all the talk of logistics, it is this grimy eroticism that prevails over the ostensibly rationalising textures of industry and commerce, in the labour and economy of porous and perverted bodies: a monster swallowing another, whole; brown water pissing from the ballast into the sea; Geneva’s famous fountain, ejaculating in rainbows; the nibbling of fishbones. In one shot in Promises from the Futures, viewed from thousands of metres above, these grand human infrastructures appear like body hairs poking into the surface of a silvery sea, oblivious to what lies beneath.
Sounding the Deep Water at Aranya Art Centre, Beidaihe, through 7 September
From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
