Reimagining Ecological Art: Connections between Marine, Botanic and Land Communities

Colloquium
Wei Hsiu Tung,  Hanpeng Lu,  Hsuan Cheng Chen,  James Jack  

This panel reimagines humans sustained through relationships with more than human species through current ecological art studies in Taiwan and Japan. Starting with marine ecosystems, Tung and Jack discuss a five-year interdisciplinary creative research project that commenced with stories discovered with the Kuroshio Current as teacher. Continuing with alternative perspectives on land-based understanding, Chen reexamines the role of human construction, not as a destructive force concerned solely with human use, but through collaboration, actively understanding and repairing the environment. Through architecture and art, it explores and responds to the coexistence and succession of life, where life forms accumulate into different knowledge, encompassing logic, ethics, and sensory experiences. Finally, Lu considers the interrelationship between plants and art through patterns, whereby humans can recognize inner connections between our own bodies and botanic bodies. The purpose of this research is to clarify how plant patterns affect artwork and to explore the complex connection between the natural properties of plants and art. The diverse art practices and research perspectives embodied in this panel work together with communities to care, repair and nurture ecosystems, humans and more than human species.