Chinese, French artists exhibit works of ecological concern in Beijing

Ocean levels rise, pollution expands, biodiversity shrinks, wildfires run amok…

As the entire ecosystem collapses, many contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Banksy and Benjamin Von Wong have become climate activists, creating work to raise awareness and imagine a more sustainable future.

Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, a Chinese artist duo based in Chengdu, and Adrien Missika, a French artist based in Berlin, have also been engaged in this endeavor. The three artists stood out among nine artists competing for the 2022 Choi Foundation Contemporary Art Award, a prize recognizing and supporting artists whose practices are imbued with environmentalism.

The works of the award winners were put together at Ophiolite at Choi Centre· Cloud House in Beijing, and the exhibit’s title, inspired by an artwork by Cao and Chen, has made many viewers scratch their heads.

Ophiolites are rocks with green serpentine patterns, which were identified by scientists in the 1970s as ancient oceanic crust thrust upon continental crust. They are found in the mountain belts such as the Alps and the Himalayas, where they document the existence of former ocean basins. The discovery and study of ophiolites led scientists to form the plate tectonic theory, which proved that mountain ranges and trenches are sutures formed by the collision of land plates, redressing the prior conception that they are folds caused by the contraction of the Earth.

Mountain ranges and trenches are often viewed as natural physical barriers separating different species of flora and fauna and cultures. Exhibit curator Lu Yinghua, a juror of the award and director of Beijing’s Inside-Out Art Museum, argues that “if we see those geological barriers as sutures, we can see that differences are not the natural cause of barriers, but rather the starting point and a synonym for communication and connection”.

Lu proposes to look at the relationship between humans and nature through the same lens. She wrote: “Instead of viewing human beings and nature as two separate categories, we should consider them as an inseparable community, where the significance of connection and interrelation far outweighs separation and conflict.”

Seeing ophiolites as a beautiful metaphor for suturing, Lu pointed out that those rocks have suggested a way for us to interact with others and the unknown, which, simply put, is to perceive differences and conflicts, not as a tendency for ruptures, but as an active suturing effort.