YIBIN LIU
The Silent Language: Exploring the Role of Silence in Cross-Cultural Communication
Summary
This research explores silence not as a void, but as a living, shifting language that both shapes and is shaped by cross-cultural encounters. Focusing on Chinese speakers navigating multilingual environments, it integrates critical discourse analysis, semi-structured interviews, participatory workshops, and sensor-based visual experiments to examine how silence mediates identity, emotion, and meaning beyond words.
Drawing from philosophy, theatre, sign language, and East Asian aesthetics, the study frames silence as an “open text” — inviting interpretation, resisting fixed boundaries, and carrying cultural memory.
In practice, silent gestures are translated into symbolic visual narratives, enabling participants to co-create and embody meanings that cannot be captured by conventional language. The findings suggest that engaging with silence can become a transformative process — one that embraces uncertainty, nurtures empathy, and inhabits the quiet spaces between what is said and what is felt.
Additional info
Yibin Liu (刘亦彬) is a cross-disciplinary artist and researcher whose work bridges linguistics, semiotics, and spatial practice. With a background in architecture and design, the research focuses on silence as a culturally embedded form of nonverbal communication, particularly in cross-cultural contexts. Combining critical theory, participatory workshops, and sensor-based media, the practice seeks to translate the unspoken into visual and tactile narratives. This approach reflects an ongoing interest in how overlooked, intangible phenomena — such as pauses, gestures, and moments of quiet — shape human connection and cultural memory.
The Silence Practice
Two symbolic recordings, 1′28″ and 2′01″ in length. Created by Yibin Liu. 2025.
What I have constructed is a system that does not rely on traditional language or text, but on a translation chain between silence action and visual symbols. In this mechanism, silence is no longer the lack of voice, but appears as a recorded sequence of silence-symbols. It has no grammar, no fixed meaning. As a real-time symbolic system, this represents a concrete experiment in using “silence as medium”—an exploration of how posthuman sensory logic might interact with embodied human expression.
Touch my silence. Mixed media (Watercolor, Resin, Foam board, Tracing paper) .Created by Yibin Liu .May 2025
Touch My Silence, integrates outcomes from the Silence Dialogue and Sensing Silence Part 2 workshops. The work involves watercolor reinterpretations of images from silent conversations, alongside remolded clay elements that embody the tactile dimension of silence—each corresponding to different moments or types of silent dialogue.
The Silence Workshop
Sensing Silence Workshop, December 2024
Throughout the process, each participant was interpreting silence from their own perspective, and the openness of this expression became fully visible.
Sensing Silence Workshop Part 2. January 2025
Silence Dialogue Workshop, March 2025
This workshop closely resembled the game "charades": one participant conveyed a sentence through gestures, while the other attempted to interpret and respond using gestures alone. The primary focus was on translation errors during silent communication and the dynamic interpersonal interaction that such ambiguity generates.
When these two layers of silent perception overlapped, a moment of equal understanding and communication emerged—not through exact translation, but through empathetic reinterpretation.
Touch my silence（part 1）. Watercolor on tracing paper. Drawn by Yibin Liu. April 2025
The above text is excerpted from The Silent Language: Exploring the Role of Silence in Cross-Cultural Communication.
