Arthub Favorite: Week 155
The (Invisible) Garden I/IV
Goldenrod
an exhibition by Zheng Bo
Duration: 2019 October 11 – December 21
Venue: No.1555 Century Avenue, Pudong District, Shanghai
The Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai (ICA at NYU Shanghai) will present an exhibition of Hong Kong-based artist ZHENG Bo, Goldenrod.
Goldenrod is an exhibition of new and existing work made by artist Zheng Bo, in collaboration with plants and people in Shanghai. In a collection of drawings and a video installation, Zheng Bo and his collaborators attempt acts of intimacy through embodied knowing and lovemaking with plants. A workshop with gardeners, thinkers, artists, and designers imagines a potential site for social and political experimentation by gathering plants and people in the form of a garden. With these works, we move through looking, touching, thinking, building – and sometimes eating, to trouble our relationships with plants as emblems of Nature, as native/invasive species, and as figures in histories of colonialism, capitalism, and socialism. Together, these works ask us to consider plants as models of being-in-the-world and as equal agents in the making of our world.
Goldenrod further searches the many registers of Nature’s meaning and representation with a talk by cultural studies scholar ZHU Yu, a workshop with artist-scholar Elaine Gan, and a performative lecture by theorist XIANG Zairong.
Goldenrod and its related events are presented as the first season of “The (Invisible) Garden”, a two-year artistic research program that inquires into the garden as a method that shapes our understanding of Nature and our relationships to other species. For four seasons, from Fall 2019 through Spring 2021, the ICA at NYU Shanghai will present artists, thinkers, and practitioners, through exhibitions, events, and a publication, to consider the garden and ask how might we denature Nature?
About the Artist
ZHENG Bo is an artist committed to human and multispecies equality. He investigates the past and imagines the future from the perspectives of marginalized communities and marginalized plants. He is learning to cultivate ecological wisdom for a Good Anthropocene.
He has worked with a number of art spaces and museums in Asia and Europe, most recently @KCUA (Kyoto), Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), Parco Arte Vivente (Torino), TheCube Project Space (Taipei), Villa Vassilieff (Paris), Times Museum (Guangzhou), and Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing). In 2018, his works have been included in perennial exhibitions such as Manifesta 12, Cosmopolis
#1.5, the 11th Taipei Biennial, the 2nd Yinchuan Biennial, and the 1st Thailand Biennial.
He taught at China Academy of Art from 2010 to 2013, and currently teaches at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.