Yuhe Hu

Yuhe Hu is a multimedia artist and researcher whose practice explores more-than-human relations, ecological narratives and forms of life that are often overlooked, marginalised or shaped by human prejudice. She holds an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Art and Technology from the China Academy of Art.

Her practice spans interactive installation, moving image, sound, digital media, physical objects and spatial narrative. Speculative design, worldbuilding and storytelling have remained central to her work, with media selected according to the narrative, relationship and mode of perception each project requires.

Her earlier practice used non-human species as starting points for speculative narratives around environmental crisis, survival and possible futures. During her MA, her work became increasingly concerned with the stories, histories and ecological entanglements of non-human species themselves, including a year-long body of work centred on fleas. Across these stages, she has developed a sustained interest in how biological, ecological and cultural information can be translated into spatial and sensory experiences.

Her current work continues this trajectory through practice-based research on more-than-human agency, sound and narrative.

More work can be found at huyuhe.com.

About research

Yuhe Hu is doing practice-based research project,sitting at the intersection of more-than-human studies, sound practice and spatial narrative. The project focuses on parasites and examines how their long-standing associations with disease, contamination and eradication have shaped their representation as external enemies or undesirable organisms. It asks how these framings influence the ways parasitic agency and ecological relations are understood.

The research approaches parasitic agency through interdependence and relationality. Parasites are studied as participants within wider networks of hosts, environments, food webs and evolutionary processes. This perspective supports an investigation into how changes to parasitic relations may affect wider ecological networks and how agency can emerge through relations rather than isolated organisms.

Through artistic practice, the project develops parasitic relations as a framework for organising sonic experiences. It explores how relations including infection, immunity, dependence, rejection, adaptation and coexistence can generate different spatial and sonic rules. Worldbuilding and storytelling provide the narrative structure, while sound, installation and audience movement translate these relations into perceptible experiences. The research will develop a series of spatial sound installations that explore new ways of sensing and narrating more-than-human agency.