SCCT 510: “Art Research in the Unruly World” Speaker Series
Speakers
CAO Minghao & CHEN Jianjun (Artists and Transdisciplinary Researchers, Chengdu, China)
Topic
Durational water-system practice – rooted in local field investigation, research, and knowledge exchange – is important both to a good understanding of the relationship between a place and traditional knowledge, and to the discussion of the diversity of geo-social contexts. This generative practice of art-based research goes beyond the ways in which a natural environment is defined through projective and conceptual means.
How do we ground our work through long term research and find a particular site as the basis of our ecological practice? In our work, we believe that any place, any subtle details of the water system rhizome can become not only a potential method for discussing and exploring deeper environmental issues but also an impetus to build a mutual alliance among the earth's ecologies.
Speakers' Bio
CAO Minghao & CHEN Jianjun are artists working and living in Chengdu, China. Their art practices are research-based and process-led, highlighting the transactional collaboration between the artists and their partners in ecological and sociocultural spheres. Dedicated to the dialogical relationship between the realities and the survival of myriad things, their practices grow from a space of entanglement in-between the material ecology of waters and the current socio-environmental realities of mankind. Tapping into this space largely untouched by existent inquiries, they explore the vicissitude of ecologies and the re-imaginaries of the future. Practicing multiple means of visual narratologies through sustainable art making, they build up a momentum for the alliance among all beings. Their projects have been shown in exhibitions including The 15th Documenta in Kassel (2022), Rethinking Nature at Madre Museum (2021-2022), The 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-2021), and COSMOPOLIS #2.0: Repenser l’humain at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019). Their research-based films have been shown at Centre Pompidou, CC Strombeek, Ateneo de Manila University Ateneo Art Gallery, OCAT Institute, and Taipei Biennale Film Screening Section. They won the Jonathan KS Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Prize in 2022 and the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris in 2020. Their 2021 works are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai.
Zoom Link
https://arizona.zoom.us/j/8267744331 - Password: SCCT510
This event is a Co-sponsored by the Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory, Department of East Asian Studies and the UA Center for East Asian Studies
