The ecoArt China artists and contributors discuss the exhibition and visual art in China as a form of environmental activism.
All events are scheduled for Thursdays at 7 pm MST/MDT with the exception of Yao Lu’s talk, which will be on a Wednesday at 7 pm. For more information and to get free tickets, please visit The China Institute.
Joshua Lewis Goldstein
September 23
Dr. Goldstein is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California, and a contributor to the ecoArt China catalogue project. He will be speaking on his new book, Remains of the Everyday: 100 Years of Recycling in Beijing (UC Press, 2020). Remains of the Everyday traces the changing material culture and industrial ecology of China through the lens of recycling, with an eye to the repeatedly reinscribed exclusion of waste workers from formations of urban citizenship, as well as the intrinsic liminality of recycling itself as an economic process.
Michael Cherney 秋麦
October 7
Michael Cherney is a Beijing-based photographer interested in rivers, the visual possibilities of the handscroll format, and calligraphy. His work has been exhibited at the Cleveland Art Museum, the Canglang Pavilion in Suzhou, the New York Metropolitan Museum, China Art Museum in Shanghai, Three Shadows Photography Arts Centre in Beijing, and The Getty Research Institute.
Zheng Chongbin 郑重宾
October 21
Zheng Chongbin is an artist interested in the architectonic spaces of ink painting and light installation, and in seeing mosses and trees, as well as other natural forms, from shifting micro- and macro-scopic perspectives. Born in Shanghai, and educated there, he now lives and works in the Bay Area. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, New York Metropolitan Museum, the Ryosokuin Temple in Kyoto, M+ in Hong Kong, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Stanford Cantor Arts Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Venice Biennale.
Yao Lu 姚璐
Wednesday, November 17
Yao Lu is a Beijing-based artist and professor of photography at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He has developed a technique of photo-montaging pictures of garbage and the ruins of demolished buildings that borrow from (and are disguised by) classical Chinese styles of landscape painting. His chronographic prints have been displayed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the China Institute Gallery in New York, the Shenzhen International Photography Exhibition, and the China Cultural Center in Stockholm.
Wen Fang 文芳
Monday, November 22
Wen Fang lives and works in Beijing. She graduated from the Department of Photography at ENS Louis-Lumière, France. When creating art, she often collaborates with ordinary people: migrant workers, women farmers, children, and in a sense, all of the people across the planet who have participated in her online Maskbook project. Her work has been exhibited at “Le festival Images Gibellina” in Sicily, the March Art Space in Geneva, Le 6b in Saint-Denis, and in Beijing, at the MUYUN Space, The University of Chicago Center in Beijing, the Today Art Museum, and the Beijing International Photography Festival.
Our sincere apologies. Due to technical difficulties, this recording is not available.
Bovey Lee 李寶怡
December 2
Bovey Lee did most of her growing up in Hong Kong, before teaching oil painting in the States. She began to focus on the age-old art of cut paper around the time she moved to Los Angeles, where she currently resides and works. Her artwork often focuses on the tenacious rootedness of nature in urban built landscapes. It has been collected by the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, BNY Mellon Corporate Art Collection, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Museum of Art, Fidelity Corporate Art Collection, Hong Kong Museum of Art, and the Pacific Asia Museum, among others.
Lisa Claypool
Series moderator and host
Lisa Claypool is Associate Professor in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture program at the University of Alberta. She studies the arts of China with a research focus on ways of seeing in the boundary spaces between science, art, and design in modern and contemporary China. She is finishing up a book manuscript about the ways design in early twentieth-century China encourages us to see the natural world. Exhibitions she has curated include China’s Imperial Modern, China Urban, and Quotationalism. She has published in the journals Yishu: The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, positions: east asia cultures critique, and The Journal of Asian Studies, among others.
