The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is hosting an in-person discussion about the site-specific installation I Look for the Sky with artist Zheng Chongbin and scholars Timothy Morton and Maya Kóvskaya on Thursday, 14 October 2021 at 18:30, in the Samsung Hall of the museum.
Zheng Chongbin’s art does not “represent” the world. It shows how different materials actively do things, revealing nonhuman participation in world-making. Passing through a mesh, light becomes iridescent waves that move with the eye. Morton writes about the interconnected “mesh” of all human and nonhuman life and nonliving entities that together form our shared ecological world. An expert on Chongbin’s art, Kóvskaya studies how the more-than-human natural world acts and “speaks.” To face the broken world of the Anthropocene — the new geological “Age of Man,” and planetary-level ecological and climate catastrophe caused by our dominant modern way of life — we need to stop imagining ourselves as “masters of nature,” and instead recognize the vital interconnection of beings and forces that co-make the world. If art can offer an intra-active embodied experience of nonhuman forces in our world, perhaps we can begin to live with respect for the world we share with myriad other beings so we can survive together on a damaged planet.
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