ART CITIES:Berlin-Zheng Bo Wanwu
Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo’s social, ecological, and community-engaged art practice has, in recent years, focused on moving beyond a human-centred perspective to an all-inclusive, multi-species approach. He takes up marginalised plants and communities of people as subjects in his large-scale interventions, which reintroduce wildness into institutional and abandoned spaces.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gropius Bau Archive
Zheng Bo’s art, which is also a form of ecological activism, invites us to reconsider the relationships between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, equality and ecology. Through films, outdoor participatory exercises and a daily practice of botanical drawing, Zheng Bo takes as his subject the politics of all life forms. From spring 2020, he committed to spending contemplative time with plants every day, drawing, listening and learning from nature. Alongside a new film and workshops, the exhibition “Wanwu Council” at brings together the first year of this daily practice, presenting 366 works on paper, drawn primarily in Hong Kong and Berlin. The story of Zheng Bo’s new series “Drawing Life” (2020–21) begins with the global pandemic and the abrupt changes in travel, life and individual consciousness that this situation necessitated. Living in Hong Kong and, like many others, facing restrictions on movement, Zheng Bo turned to the most elementary of artistic practices, nature drawing, which requires nothing but simple materials, time and the ability and inclination to observe. Finding an ethical and philosophical imperative through this activity, he describes his thinking: “Nowadays it’s no longer about our abilities to draw. It’s about our willingness to draw, to sit with other lives and draw them”. Although he could often go outside, there were times when, facing a mandatory quarantine after he was able to travel again, he drew the same fern for 14 days, indoors. The resulting contemplative series, “Drawing Life” responds to current global conditions and is a keystone of the exhibition. The title of the exhibition, “Wanwu Council”, draws from the Daoist notion of wanwu, a term that means “ten thousand things”, “myriad happenings”, but also “more-than-human”, and designates the infinite possibilities of life in all of its forms. A core action of this exhibition is Zheng Bo’s organisation of the “Wanwu Council”, a group of artists, scientists and activists that will gather in August 2021 in Berlin. Each member of the council will channel another form of life or matter-energy: light, water, seasons, soil, microbes, weeds, plane trees, bees, foxes, communities, histories and spirits. The task of the council is to collectively write a manifesto for a wanwu future. Additionally, the eshibition presents a new film that speculates on the central question Zheng Bo posed during his residency: “How do plants practice politics?” Titled “The Political Life of Plants” (2021), the c. 30-minute long film has as its protagonist an ancient beech forest in Grumsin, Brandenburg, which is a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. The film, which was supported by the Schering Stiftung, also features the artist in conversation with Berlin- and Potsdam-base scientists Matthias Rillig and Roosa Laitinen. During his residency at Gropius Bau, entitled “Botanical Comrades” Zheng Bo hosted events on the start of every solar term, the beginning of a new period in the East Asian lunisolar calendar, which divides a year into 24 solar term periods according to agricultural and astronomical events. This structuring of time intends to “help humans to sense the change of seasons”. From these prototype events, including walk-readings and drawing weeds, stem Zheng Bo’s “Ecosensibility Exercises” (2021). Throughout the exhibition, Zheng Bo is leading exercises, every afternoon, taking place on a new temporary platform built within the “Gropius Wood”, the community of plane trees found west of the Gropius Bau building. These instructions will also be accessible digitally and can be practiced anytime. Uniting these activities is the artist’s proposal that by overcoming the fiction of human primacy, we can rebuild coexistence for all, interdependent forms of life on Earth.
Photo: Zheng Bo, Botanical Comrades, What Do the Trees Want?, 24.10.2020, © Gropius Bau, Photo: Laura Fiorio
Info: Curators: Stephanie Rosenthal with Clare Molloy, Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 21/6-23/8/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 10:00-19:00, www.berlinerfestspiele.de
