Contemporary Environmental Art in China: Portraying Progress, Politics, and Ecosystems

ABSTRACT

Art has long been an important force in environmental movements. In China, environmental art is a fast-growing sector of the art scene. This new area of emphasis is expanding the function of art and aiding in China’s environmental movement by challenging both imported Western practices and Maoist era philosophy, thereby opening up new ways of considering the relationship between human “progress,” political systems, economic practices, and their repercussions on existing ecosystems. I turn to artist Xu Xiaoyan’s paintings to explore how the notion of “progress” can be challenged through art. I use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to map how Xu’s art offers viewers space to think outside dominant paradigms, creates the potential for changes in human consciousness, considers the environment as a composition of relationships and interactions, and provokes discussion concerning the impact of linear notions of time on human conceptions of nature.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• environmental art
• China
• territorialization
• visual rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A growing number of artists are using their work to comment on China’s rapid urbanization and its impacts on the people, land, culture, and customs including Liu Jiahua, Xu Weixin, and Wang Shaolun.

2. Hutongs are traditional Chinese neighborhoods that consist of single-family homes tightly packed together on narrow streets.

3. I turn to these two French philosophers in this analysis of Chinese art for two major reasons. First, because many of their theories and ideas including the rhizome and war machine were inspired, in part, by a confrontation with China (see Deleuze (2005) and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, pp. 18–19, 20, 386, and 404–405) and, second, because Deleuze, in particular, engaged with art in a sustained manner throughout his career (See Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation).

4. This work is especially important in China, where levels of environmental awareness have remained relatively low until recently due to (1) poverty and lack of education and (2) the embrace of economic development at any cost.