Zheng Bo is an ecoqueer artist of ethnic Bai heritage. Through drawing, dance and film, they cultivate kinships with plants. These relations are aesthetic, erotic, and political. For them, art does not arise from human creativity, but more-than-human vibrancy. Bo lives in a village on the south side of Lantau Island, Hong Kong. Guided by Daoist wisdom, they grow weedy gardens, living slogans, biophilia films, and ecosocialist gatherings. These diverse projects, alive and entangled, constitute a garden where they collaborate with both human and nonhuman thinkers and activists. Their ecological art practice contributes to an emergent planetary indigeneity. In 2023 Zheng Bo is working on the Artist’s Garden commission at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai and three botanical public works outside Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. In 2022 they presented a forest dance film titled Le Sacre du printemps at the 59th Venice Biennale. They taught at China Academy of Art from 2010 to 2013, and currently teaches at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
Enzo Camacho (*1985, Philippines) and Ami Lien (*1987, USA) are an artist duo based between New York and Berlin. They have had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg (2018); and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2018). Their work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2021); the 5th New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); the 39th EVA International, Limerick (2021); Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020); the Drawing Center, New York (2020); the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2019); the Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London (2019); the NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore (2018); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2017); Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok (2017); and Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila (2009). In 2023, they were the recipients of the Gold Art Prize, and they are currently Senior Fellows at the Lunder Institute of American Art at Colby College.
Minty Donald is based in Glasgow and Madrid. Donald is an artist, researcher and Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at the University of Glasgow. Her practice takes multiple forms, determined by the context in which she is working, but includes performance, sculpture, participatory events and writing. In her practice, she treats other-than-human matter as a collaborator, acknowledging its liveliness and agency, while also recognising the limits and inequalities of human/other-than-human collaboration. Her recent practice focuses on interrelationships between humans and water, and between humans and stone.
Franklin Ginn is a Senior Lecturer in cultural and historical geography at the University of Bristol, UK. From 2011 to 2015 he was a lecturer in human geography at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Domestic wild: Memory, nature and gardening in suburbia (Routledge, 2016), Co-Editor with Marion Ernwein and James Palmer of The Work That Plants Do (2021) and Co-Editor of Environmental Humanities. His current research focuses on the politics and philosophy of plant life, including fieldwork in urban Pakistan, and on Anthroposcenic landscapes in Scotland. Franklin has a PhD in Geography from King’s College London.
Sophie Xiaofei Guo is an associate lecturer and PhD candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK. Her research investigates the intersections of biotechnology and contemporary art in Sinophone cultures, with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, and race. Her thesis examines how biomedicine has transformed image-making in Sinophone cultures from the late 1980s to the present day. Her publications include "Doubting sex: Examining the biomedical gaze in Lu Yang’s UterusMan" (2019), ‘Gender in Chinese contemporary art’ (2018), and “We will infiltrate your bloodline”: Biohacking gender, trans aesthetics and the making of queer kinship in the work of Jes Fan’ (forthcoming book chapter).
Pei-Ying Lin is an artist/designer from Taiwan and currently based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Her main focus is on the combination of science and human society through artistic methods, and is particularly interested in building a common discussion ground for different cultural perspective regarding elements that constructs our individual perception of the world. Recently she has been focusing on manipulating the boundary of invisible/visible, living/non-living and finding ways to build tools and methods that facilitate such explorations. She has won the Honorary Mention in Hybrid Arts Category of Ars Electronica 2015, Professional Runner Up in Speculative Concepts of Core 77 Awards 2015, BioArt and Design Award 2016, and the first group of Taiwanese artists of residence in the program of Accelerate@CERN. Her project PSX Consultancy is a permanent collection of Museum of Architecture and Design, Slovenia.
Loretta Lou is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at Durham University. She specializes in the study of environment, health, activism, and self-development in East Asia. Her first project was an ethnographic study of “Green Living” in Hong Kong and its implications for self-development, relationality, everyday ethics, and social movements. Building on her interest in environmental activism in East Asia, her second research project, funded by the European Research Council, “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry,” focuses on the ways Chinese people negotiate and make sense of toxic pollution, their perceptions of (environmental) injustice, and how they cope with contrived ignorance. In her research projects, she questions the interplay between freedom and (inter-)dependency, resistance and resilience, noticing and unnoticing, and the production of knowledge and ignorance in the most mundane forms in everyday life.
Alexandra Regan Toland is Associate Professor for Arts and Research at the Bauhaus University Weimar and co-chair of the Commission on the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Soils of the International Union of Soil Sciences. She earned her MFA from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and a doctorate degree in landscape planning from the TU-Berlin as a DFG fellow in the Perspectives of Urban Ecology Graduate Research Group. Alex has published widely on artistic (research) practices as they relate to soil protection and the Anthropocene and her works have been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Museum Schloß Moyland, German Hygiene Museum Dresden, and the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow.
Mia Yu is a Beijing-based art historian, curator, and educator. Her research interests include Asian geopolitics, energy politics and the Anthropocene from the perspective of Northeast China. She was the winner of the Yishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Art (2018), the recipient of the Tate Asia Research Travel Fellowship (2017), and the CCAA Art Critic Award (2015). She is on the jury committee for the Hyundai Blue Prize For Emerging Curators. As an adjunct professor, she has lectured at China Art Academy, China Central Art Academy, Xi’an Art Academy, and Peking University. In 2021, Mia Yu initiated a long-term curatorial project “The Anthropocene North” that is focused on ecological entanglements and sensibilities from the perspective of Northeast Asia.