Wandering into the Depths of Nature: Fieldwork and Environmental Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Women Artists
Yining He
trans. Li Wenrui
Contemporary Chinese women artists’ field practices are redefining our understandings of the relationship between the environment and the body. As global ecological crises intensify and the Anthropocene comes into sharper focus, their field-based work bears witness to ongoing ecological transformations across China, from industrialization’s reshaping of traditional landscapes to climate change’s impact on geological structures. Through embodied experience and video works, they explore new possibilities for reimagining human relations with the environment.
They do not simply appropriate scientific methods in their practices, but draw on ecological wisdom grounded in women’s embodied experience and modes of perception. Mythical female figures from early Chinese civilization, such as Queen Mother of the West, Nüwa, and the bird Jingwei acquired experience and insights from the dynamic interplay between yin and yang, heaven and earth. Through direct bodily perception, they transformed natural chaos into distinctive understandings. This tradition of ecological intelligence offers important inspiration for rethinking women’s ecological worldviews and confronting global environmental challenges today. It suggests that women’s embodied experience and perception may contain vital forms of knowledge overlooked by modern scientific paradigms. Rooted in the complementary forces of yin and yang, this ancient wisdom points toward a renewed and more sustainable relationship between humanity and the environment.
Zhang Wenxin explored deep-time topologies in underground caves, while Liu Yujia opened all her senses to an unscripted journey through the forests of northeast China. He Zike imagined a data centre in Guizhou as a site of collapsed geological memory, and Chen Xiaoyi brought together fragmented civilizations across millennia from Lhasa’s rock carvings and Australian caves. While Han Qian entered the ruins of mines in Hebei to conduct archaeologies of memory, Xiaoxiao Xu travelled 25,000 kilometers along roads tracing the Great Wall. Their works move beyond the conventional boundaries of art-making to emerge as a distinctive practice of ecological cognition. Taking the traveling exhibition “Photographic Geomancy” I curated as a point of departure, this article examines the convergence of fieldwork and ecological perception in the work of these six women artists. 1
Building on my own fieldwork experience, this article situates the artists’ practices within three analytical frameworks: imagination and narrative, wholeness and fragmentation, and remoteness and closeness. 2 It explores how their embodied experience and creative reflections in the field generate new knowledge, paying particular attention to the ways in which these women artists use artistic practice to rethink the human–nature relationship in the face of environmental change. In doing so, it offers new perspectives and inspirations for both theoretical inquiry and practical exploration in contemporary art and field-based research.
- Commissioned by Guangdong Times Museum, the exhibition uses Chinese geomancy (fengshui / kan-yu) as a metaphor and is structured into four interwoven sections. It features responses by twenty-two artists (including two artists in screening) to complex issues related to China’s historical landscapes, aesthetics, culture, ecology, and geopolitical realities. The touring exhibition, presented at Fotografiska Shanghai from June 27 to October 8, 2025, explores how photography and moving images can reconstruct visual narratives related to geography. ↲
- These three dimensions correspond respectively to the poetic transformation mechanisms in women artists’ environmental perception, methods of knowledge archaeology in deep time, and affective geographical strategies in spatial reconfiguration. ↲
To read the full article, see https://cawa.art/feature/wandering-into-the-depths-of-nature/
(Commissioned by Ye Ying, chief editor of The Art Journal)