Skin Without Border: Exploring shape-shifting through moving image practice
About Wei’s Research:
My research explores the concept of shapeshifting within moving image practice. I treat shapeshifting not just as a folkloric topic, but also as an active methodology. Grounded in feminist New Materialism and phenomenology, the project reimagines identity as fluid. How do our bodies relate to moving images when we rely on physical sensation rather than just sight? To answer this, I investigate cross-cultural folklore, drawing parallels between Chinese zhiguai tales and Scottish Gaelic myths. Figures like the rat spirit or the water horse operate as sites of resistance. They act as “leaking bodies” that constantly blur the boundaries between the human spectator and the non-human environment.
My artistic practice translates these ideas into multi-sensory moving image installations. My recent project, Portal, employs tactile world-building. It uses complete darkness and rodent-inspired performance to investigate non-visual perception. The work links this sensory exploration directly to the visceral memory of my own C-section birth and my grandmother’s death. My upcoming project, Eros(ion), shifts this focus outward. It explores the Scottish myth of the water horse and Chinese water spirits to examine the tension between physical desire and ecological change.
These projects navigate the transition toward a spatial cinema. They transform private, sensory experiences into broader cultural narratives, asking how shifting environments physically and emotionally shape the living creatures within them.
About Wei:
周薇Wei Zhou (b. 1993, she/they) is a Chinese filmmaker and artist based in Glasgow. Working primarily with moving image and text, she explores sensory perception, embodiment through personal, auto-ethnographic methods. She is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where her research focuses on shapeshifting through moving image practices
Portal (2026) explores thresholds as ruptures in form, space, and perception. The project began with the movie theatre EXIT sign, an index of departure or escape that, like Lucio Fontana’s slashes, invites us to look beyond the frame. The work adopts the rat-spirit as a logic of navigation. In the pitch-black theatre, far-infrared cameras reduce the world to black and white. Sharp outlines dissolve into heavy grain and blur. A body fadesinto formless, shifting shadows. The imagery demands a rodent-like intimacy, pulling the focus toward the raw, tactile language of touch. This work is originally shown as projection onto a mesh screen, creating a double-layered image. Resonating with Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the wild tongue, the voice narration refuses to translate in real-time. Fractures are deliberately produced, initiating a recursive slippage where languages shadow and fold into one another. Through these fluid shifts, the work shapes a sensory experience where meaning is held in suspension. The work is a a part of series of related artworks, including a work titled as C/Section (2025) which features a dialogue between my mother and me regarding my caesarean birth using two back-to-back CRT monitors, and Portable Hauntology (2026), which is a three-channel looping video interweaves seemingly unrelated iPhone footage including small openings in daily life, thermal blurs, and ritualistic acts recorded in the aftermath of my grandmother’s sudden death and the Ghost Festival in mid-July.
[Credits for Portal
Direction, Camera and Editing: Wei Zhou
Performer: Yuxi Jiang, Wenqi Zou (Hand)
Costume Design: Linglong Wang
Sound Design: Eye Suriyanon
Voiceover: Lydia Davies & Wei Zhou
Color Grading: Poppy Hobbs]
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