Text: Dr. Sophia Kidd

BIOS: Embodied Environments art exhibition presents piantings, multi-media artworks, installation, video, and performances by three generations of ecologically-oriented artists. All six of these artists: Betsy Damon, Dai Guangyu, Xiong Wenyun, Li Xinmo, Song Chen, and Li Yaoyao all have a deep connection to Southwest China’s art ecology and history. BIOS highlights the power and beauty of masculine strength and rationality polarized by feminine intuition and connectedness. By spanning fifty years of ecologically-oriented Southwest China creative praxis, works in this exhibition hearken back to traditional Chinese forms of art, such as ink-wash and calligraphic writing, as well as forward into the future of biological and natural systems merged with artificial intelligence. Central to all of this is the human body, with its frailty and interconnectedness within natural and artificial environments.

BIOS: Embodied Environments exhibition grows upwards from the soil of Southwest art, respecting and revering what has come before. We have invited two central organizers of the 1995 (Chengdu) and 1996 (Lhasa) Keepers of the Water performance art festivals, Betsy Damon (New York, USA) and Dai Guangyu (Chengdu, China). These art events form an important element of Chengdu’s world famous performance art scene, having at the time taken the Chinese media and nation by storm, enchanting audiences with the idea and praxis of socially-engaged ‘art for the people,’ and drawing attention to the water quality of the Jinjiang River (then known as the Funan River). The Keepers culminated in Betsy Damon’s collaboration with Chengdu engineers, government officials, and artists in creating Chengu’s Living Water Garden, which continues today to clean thousands of gallons of water per day along the Jinjiang River. This project is today researched and written about by scholars in the UK, Europe, and the USA, but is fading from collective memory in Southwest China, as new arts infrastructure and a thriving contemporary art scene spring forward without sufficiently acknowledging the past.

Riverside Art Center, located along a luxurious waterway in nearby Chongqing, is a perfect venue for an homage to the Keepers of the Water, a perfect platform upon which to bring together two icons of Southwest China’s early performance and ecologically-oriented art practise with four equally exceptional ecologically-oriented performance artists, Xiong Wenyun, Li Xinmo, Song Chen, and Li Yaoyao, all profoundly committed to the health and vitality of human bodies in their embodied environments.

Lastly, BIOS: Embodied Environments integrates Chinese and international eco-art discourses, highlighting China’s unique contribution in the fields of philosophy, aesthetic theory, metaphysics, and natural science, offering alternative paradigms for understanding of our natural universe and humankind’s place within it.

Observation of Principles Ge wu

Every action is essentially an interaction. This exhibition celebrates interaction over isolation in the search for originary principles (gewu 格物). Betsy Damon’s interactive performance artwork Listening to the River  (Ting heliu 听河流）brings this New York artist’s 60 years as a water activist and ecologically-minded artist into play as Damon invites community participants to join her in listening to the Bitter Bamboo River, which wends its way alongside the exhibition site at the Riverside Art Center. The artist will lead us in silencing our mental noise (zanian 杂念) long enough to feel, listen to, and join with the river in its flow through time and space. Damon’s contribution to Southwest performance art and water protection is famous both within and outside of China, with her collaboration with Dai Guangyu and the 719 Artists Alliance on the Keepers of the Water performance art festivals in 1995 (Chengdu) and 1996 (Lhasa). Her concurrent design and supervision of Chengdu’s Living Water Garden, still cleaning and enriching the Jinjiang river today, brought national leaders such as Jiang Zemin to the park’s opening. Media coverage and international arts writing about the Keepers of the Water, as well as the Living Water Garden warrant our attention today, with the realization that Southwest China artists, audiences, media, and leaders have always valued living waters that flow through this region.

Dai Guangyu’s installation artworks Water Traces (Shui xing liu hen 水行留痕) and Water Moves with Sound (Shui xing you sheng 水行有声) present material microcosms within which the eternal principle of flowing water leaving physical traces, which while predictable in principle, are utterly unpredictable in praxis. Dai’s father was a student of the late Qing scholar, Qian Mu 钱穆. Thus, the artist’s training in classical scholarship and poetry enriches his contemporary art practise with thousands of years of semiotic systems, the most vital of which the artist has culled throughout a lifetime of work with Chinese ink-wash, installation, and performative artworks. For example, while Water Moves with Sound primarily concerns our observation of principles gewu, this work also involves a sound component, evoking questions raised by Zhulin qixian 竹林七贤 literati Ji Kang’s 嵇康 Theory of No Sadness or Joy in Music (Sheng wu ai le lun 声无哀乐论). This text by Ji Kang explores the power of music (which we may extend to art in general) to change the way humans think about non-human elements in the world.

Embodied Environments: Thought, Feeling, and Action

Human awareness consists of two poles, one being what we perceive in our environment, while the other pole consists of what we don’t perceive in our environment. Beyond the visual horizon, there is a mental horizon, and for some, there is even a spiritual horizon, beyond thought. We always relate what we see to what we think, and what we think to absolutely everything. The performance art component of BIOS art exhibition allows its artists to use a finite human body to express the infinitude of our living systems. Song Chen’s Soil and Body as One (Shentu bu er 身土不二) sanctifies the Riverside Art Center with its live performance artwork. Song’s use of physical movement and live sound, as well the natural material of soil , combines as a semiotic system transcending the finite materiality of the body (wei wu 唯物), leaning into the infinite scope of the human heart-mind (wei xin 唯心) in connection with nature (xin wu bu er 心物不二).

We may think that human extinction will mark the end of the world. However, there will always be life on earth, with or without the human race. The installation art component of BIOS art exhibition allows its artists to mold and re-create space in ways that Gilles Deleuze speaks of in his Thousand Plateaus as ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization.’ With her large scale ambient installation Birth (Dansheng 诞生), Li Xinmo appropriates Chinese mythological origin stories as well as classical Chinese calligraphy in ways that re-map these ancient systems of symbols and connotation onto the modern woman’s body, being birthed into a world where biological systems are fusing with artificial and cosmic forms of intelligence.

Situated Emotional Ontology

BIOS: Embodied Environments explores the phenonenon of ‘situatedness’ (qingjing 情景) through lenses of  ‘idea-image’ (yixiang 意象), and ’emotional ontology’ (qing benti  情本体) , arriving at a better understanding of ‘situated emotions’ (qingjing jiaorong 情景交融). The idea-image is a key aesthetic component in Chinese literature and art, fusing the word-image binary so prevalent in Western aesthetics into a fundemental unit of representation consisting in the word-as-image. ‘Emotional ontology,’ then, examines how the material world is imbued with subjective feeling, both arousing and reflecting psychological states in the artist, who is rooted in time and place. Li Yaoyao’s performance video artwork, A Dream of Rain (Yu de meng 雨的梦), is a gorgeous performance of observing priniciples and situated emotions (qingjing jiaorong 情景交融). The artist sets off on a detourn along the Yangzi river’s shoreline, observing natural environments and human communities through which the river flows. The artist’s body is not present in the work, but her mind’s eye serves as protagonist of A Dream of Rain. The artist’s voiceover orates her own poetry in a melancholy tone, beginning with the premise, “I’m tired. My eyes are hardly awake,” setting the tone for the heroine’s search for vitality in a dying world. Here we experience the artist’s situated emotions as a stage across which idea-images flit and dance. This situatedness of a Chinese artist in her native region engraves a sense of gravitas into her film. Although the artist’s understanding of nature and culture derives from her life growing up in China,  Li got her Masters degree at the Venice Academy of Fine Art in Italy. Thus her exposure to global conversations about ecology and art situate her art practise within a larger milieu than that of this region alone.

Xiong Wenyun, together with Betsy Damon and Dai Guangyu, is one of the most accomplished and mature artists in BIOS exhibition. Her artistic practise spans from pre-Chinese 1985 New-Wave to present, with nearly forty years of painting, installation, and performance art creation. BIOS features Xiong’s 1998-2001 well-known yet understudied three year performance artwork, Moving Rainbow (Liudong caihong 流动彩虹). This is a truly situated artwork focusing on human emotions related to China’s Western regions and the environmental degradation resulting from economic development. BIOS also features Xiong’s most recent series, Arrows (Jiantou 箭头) and Tibetan Medicine (Zangyao 藏药). The spatial nature of paintings in Arrows speaks to the human need for understanding human physical, logistical, emotional, aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual trajectories. Xiong’s focus on Tibetan Medicine originally counterpointed an adjacent and concurrent series she painted on Western Medicine, which evoked what Michel Foucault spoke of as ‘biopower,’ drawing attention to the ways in which Western medical discourses affects Chinese bodies, health, and thinking. This exhibition’s selection of Xiong’s series on Tibetan Medicine highlights the ontological, spritual, and neurodivergent systems of thought that Tibetan medicine offers us as a way of healing the body in union with the mind and soul. These abstract and almost decorative paintings create pallettes of emotional ontology which audiences may internalize through viewing these artworks.

Conclusion

BIOS exhibition is about elemental gestalt, and by inviting Dai Guangyu to contribute his genius to that of five exceptional women, we may more fully experience the magic of interaction between polarities. It is my understanding and hope that this exhibition, by combining Sinitic and non-Sinitic ecological and aesthetic theory, will fill in areas of the “canvas” of ecological aesthetics that have heretofore been left blank in global discourse, presenting a more complete picture of how humanity can survive in harmony and beauty with the earth we live on.

–Dr. Sophia Kidd, Bellingham, Washington, USA, April 3 2024

Exhibition information:

BIOS: Embodied Environments

Coration：Sophia Kidd

Artists: Betsy Damon, Dai Guangyu, Xiong Wenyun, Li Xinmo, Song Chen, Li Yaoyao

Duration: 4.27.2024-8.1.2024

Address: Riverside Art Center, Qianfang Industrial Park, Chayuan New District, Jingkai District, Chongqing, China