I reviewed Zheng Bo’s website for this assignment because he is a contemporary artist whose work is based in creating new perspectives and highlighting traditionally marginalized perspectives about how we interact with the natural world and built environment. One of Zheng’s projects is to rewild certain built environments, so instead of creating a manicured landscape in new developments, he brings in native plants that are considered by some to be weeds and lets them take over spaces that people have to interact with. He has collaborated with ecologists, botanists, and scholars to create courses for people to understand indigenous histories and uses of plants. And he has planted bushes in the formation of slogans from the Maoist era that let plants tell a story about the current ecological crisis in China. In all of Zheng’s work, he examines the question of how the marginalization of people parallels the marginalization of the natural world.
His website’s initial pages don’t contain words. Rather, they are a series of photographs of his works. For one of these works, “Pteridophilia,” Zhen hired young gay men to interact erotically with plants in a Taiwanese forest. The work pushed eco-queer theories by creating new languages of intimacy between plants and people, multi-species relationships. Some of the photographs are so abstracted that human body parts are read as parts of the landscape. I wonder what kinds of thoughts and questions are evoked by these photographs for viewers who don’t know his work. It is only by clicking on the letter in the upper left-hand corner of the screen that viewers can get to his biography, art exhibits, and explanations of works. Because his work is constantly widening discourses related to art, design, architecture, landscapes, ecology, botany, anthropology, gender, sexuality, and the relationship between species, I think it is important to explore as part of this course and will be a critical part of ecological discourses in the years to come.
.