Nominated by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago I use sculpture installation, technology, live plants and social media to draw attention to the unresolved entanglement between technology and ecological crisis. I think art as a creative agency can provide a unique visual outlook that challenges what has been envisioned by progressivism as the landscape of our future relationship with nature. The visual transformation in natural landscape is greatly altered by this age of human domination addressed as the anthropocene era. Human activities accelerated landscape transformation in various ways from urbanization to desertification. The satellite vision and the Internet shift the visuality of the nature landscape from the traditional horizon line to a more blurred out vertical dimension. Plants plays important role in my installations as they have the unique ability to occupy space, grow and thrive on basic needs such as sunlight, air and water; they are vertical life forms as the roots reach down for water and the shoots rise up for sunlight. The poetic parallel between plant life and human activity is what I am most curious in: would new hope emerge between the vulnerability of ecosystem and the resilience of vegetal life? In my speculative systems, all material, objects and living matter is given a chance to inhabited, grow, parasite and decompose, in finding a solution to our collective anxiety embedded in the ecological crisis. Image: Domestaponic: stackable broomstick farm, 2016
LAUNCH Invitational