Cici Zhu
Drawing has always been the place I turned to when I had something to say. Before I had the right words, I had lines, colors, and gestures. As a child, I joined a summer program that brought students from Shanghai into rural communities in Jiangxi and Yunnan. I didn’t speak the local dialects, but I learned that connection could begin long before language—through drawing, through shared snacks, through handmade things.
That feeling never left me. Years later, I was in a new school, in a new country, carrying questions I didn’t yet know how to ask. One day, I set up a small booth at our spring carnival with hexagon boards, a few boxes of paint, and a sign inviting people to make something of their own. I expected it to be quiet. But people came and stayed. Some painted, some wrote. Some didn’t say anything at all. But each tile became a way of expressing something they hadn’t yet put into words.
That moment was the beginning of Common Names, a growing archive of small, shared expressions. Over the past year, I began collecting tiles from schools, libraries, and communities near and far. What started as a personal experiment became a communal gesture. I built the installation for this exhibition—composed of 2,500 hand-painted hexagons—layer by layer, story by story. It’s not meant to be a finished answer. It’s meant to be a space. A space to feel, to remember, to connect.
As Common Names evolved, I also started thinking about how to bring its spirit into a curated exhibition. That’s how Unspoken Codes came to life. I invited eleven artists whose work—whether conceptual or intuitive—shares a sensitivity to ambiguity, restraint, and emotional presence. Their pieces are shown side by side with the community tiles, not in contrast, but in conversation. This exhibition resists hierarchy. It’s about proximity, attention, and the permission to feel.
Curating this show has changed how I think about authorship. At times I was guiding the shape of things. At other times, I was simply listening. I realized that the work doesn’t speak in a single voice. It echoes—between artist and viewer, between individual and collective, between what is said and what is felt.
My installation is suspended in space, floating above and around the viewer. It invites people to walk beneath it, or through it. Each tile holds a gesture, a memory, a moment. Alone, they are quiet. Together, they form something shared—an emotional architecture.
Art used to be my way of saying what I couldn’t put into words. Now I see it as a way to listen, too.