Thesis Proposal - LIU Mankun July 28

Qualifying report, LIU Mankun (56057109)
Student Name (Student No.): LIU Mankun (56057109)
Programme: Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Media
Title of Research Proposal:
In Search of Ecocultural Holism: Art, Ecology, and Indigeneity in Greater China
Report Type (Reporting Period):
Qualifying Report (1 Sep 2020 – 06 August 2021)

Content
Working title.............................................................................................................................2
1. Introduction..........................................................................................................................2
2. Literature review..................................................................................................................7
2.1 Ecological art history: the canon, its recent expansion, and regional specificities..........8
Broad issues raised by canonical Anglophone studies of ecological art...........................8
Ecological art in expansion and its bearing on art history.............................................10
Emerging studies of ecologically concerned art in China...............................................11
2.2 Conceptualizing art through interdisciplinary theories of political ecology..................14
An overview of ecologically informed critical theories...................................................14
Art as practices of interdisciplinary political ecology: convictions and analytical
methods............................................................................................................................15
Eco-ontologies.................................................................................................................17
Political ecology practiced through activism..................................................................18
2.3 Indigeneity: conceptualization, ecological dimensions, and regional specificities........19
Conceptualizing indigeneity: two basic frameworks.......................................................19
Key ecological terms in Indigenous studies.....................................................................21
Contextualizing Indigeneity in Greater China.................................................................26
3. Methodology.......................................................................................................................31
3.1 Research approach: collective case studies....................................................................31
3.2 Data Collection Methods................................................................................................32
3.3 Data analyses..................................................................................................................34
Aspects of analyses..........................................................................................................34
A toolkit for analysis........................................................................................................34
3.4 Limitation.......................................................................................................................37
4. Chapter breakdown...........................................................................................................38
Chapter 1 Introduction.........................................................................................................39
Chapter 2: Hegemonic modernization in Greater China and its bearings on ecology.........40
Chapter 3: Indigeneity through mythological writing: Nuò/Nuó’s lifeworld and the re-
enchantment of rural eco-cosmos.........................................................................................43
Chapter 4: Indigeneity without possessive sovereignty: nomadic experiments in
contemporary Chinese art....................................................................................................45
Chapter 5: Indigeneity in the politics of aesthetics: Pulima’s navigation between the artistic
traditions and contemporaneity............................................................................................47
Chapter 6: Indigeneity through the politics of ecology: the restoration of homelands and
the recent evolution of contemporary Indigenous art in Taiwan..........................................49
Chapter 7: Conclusion/Epilogue..........................................................................................51
5. Selective bibliography........................................................................................................52
Appendix: Eco-art parameters and variables summarized from existing research........62
References...............................................................................................................................63
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Working title
In Search of Ecocultural Holism: Art, Ecology, and Indigeneity in Greater China
1. Introduction
This research studies an emergent field of ecologically concerned arts in Greater China that
foregrounds politically ecological and Indigenous1 perspectives. In conceptualizing the art
practices in focus as counterstrategies against the modernization enterprise of socio-
environmental colonization in the region, it explores their sociopolitical, ecocultural, and art-
critical implications through a collective case study approach.
In the recent five to ten years, a rise of ecological consciousness is evident in
contemporary arts in Mainland China that engage with socio-environmental critiques,
multispecies relationships, and environmental activism (Yang 2019).2 In Taiwan, a similar
ecological awareness is observed at the intersection of social scientific studies of urban and
rural environments with extant socially engaged and community-based artistic practices since
1
Notes on capitalization: in writing produced under this research project, the term “Indigenous” with the capitalized “I” is
used to designate human populations that are identified as historically and politically bounded communities who had
inhibited a land before the arrival of later settlers. Meanwhile, “indigenous” and “indigeneity” with the lower-case “i”
denotes the general status of being native to a territory that can describe humans, other-than-human beings, and abiotic
matters. My differentiation of the terms follows the newly established norm in academic publishing houses and mass media
newsrooms to distinguish “Indigenous” from the apolitical use of indigenous as a generic term. Specifically, the
establishment of the practice in writing demonstrates an acknowledgement of the politicization of the conception of
Indigeneity because of global Indigenous activisms since 1970 (Weeber 2020; Scire 2020).
2
To illustrate some trends within this extended field of emergent ecological practices: artists including Ren Ri (c. 任日), Jin
Lipeng (c. 靳立鹏), Li Shan (c. 李山), Zhang Pingjie (c. 張平潔), and Liang Shaoji (c. 梁紹基) have been focusing on
interspecies relationships between humans, plants, animals, and insects by incorporating knowledges and techniques from
biology and genetics; artists such as Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun (c. 曹明浩，陳建軍), Cheng Xinhao (c. 程新皓), and
Liu Chuang (c. 劉窗) have recently initiated several long-term projects in Southwest China to investigate socio-ecological
and geopolitical problems in the region through extensive ethnographic works; meanwhile, environmental activisms through
art pedagogies and social critiques are seen in Xu Bing’s (c. 徐冰) “Forest Project” (c.《林木森計劃》, since 2004),
Brother Nut’s (c. 堅果兄弟) “Project Dust” (c.《塵埃計劃》, 2015) and “Bring Your Salt with You” project (c.《帶鹽計
劃》, 2018).
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the early 2000s.3 This ecological turn in artistic practice within Greater China remains largely
unmapped by existing ecologically concerned art scholarship, which has so far focused upon
practices in Western Europe, North America, and places subjected to settler colonialism in the
Global South.4 To fill this gap is both necessary and theoretically significant for it can unearth
the idiosyncrasies of the ecological crises in Greater China from the perspective of art and
introduce into the critical theory cluster of art history and criticism alternative metaphysical
models to modern Western dualism (Lee 2019, xix–xxv; Zheng and Lee 2016).
With this acknowledgement, the present research intends to help fill the gap by studying
a field of works whose artistic languages and eco-critical perspectives are informed by non-
Western and non-modern worldviews grounded in the constantly transforming Indigenous
and rural societies in Great China. In Mainland China, such practices are exemplified by
moving images works, multi-media installations, and ethnographical eco-documentaries that
trace the contemporary presence of various animist cosmovisions in economically and
politically marginalized regions. These evocative ecological imaginations are often contrasted
with visual representations of socio-environmental degradations in everyday reality, thus
revealing the deep ruptures between traditional and contemporary life. In Taiwan, recent
works of Indigenous artists have demonstrated a shared interest in resuming a closer human-
3
For example, a series of environmentally concerned socially engaged art projects initiated by artist, curator, and scholar Wu
Mali including Of The River – A Community Based Eco-Art Project (c. 《人在江湖—淡水河溯河行動》, 2006), Art as
Environment: A Cultural Action in Tropic of Cancer (c.《北回歸線環境藝術行動》, 2006-2007), Taipei Tomorrow as A
Lake Again (c.《台北明天還是一個湖》, 2008), and Art as Environment – A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek (c.
《樹梅坑溪環境藝術行動》, 2010-2012).
4
The 120th issue of Third Text, came out in 2013, carried out the first major scholarly attempt to examine contemporary arts
and the politics of ecology in the Global South. It greatly expanded the geopolitical and theoretical span of preceding
ecological art research that was limited to European-North American contexts.
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environmental relationship and reconstructing their traditional territories,5 which have been
continuously lost to State-driven land expropriations, capitalist economic development, and
frequent environmental disasters. Their holistic worldviews and artistic expressions stemming
from Indigenous traditions have acquired increasing visibility in the contemporary art scene
of Taiwan and Austronesia since the early 2010s.
To fully address the art-historical, ecocultural, and sociopolitical implications of the
above practices, this research contextualizes their emergence in a long-term process of
modernization in Greater China that began at the end of the 19th century. This modernization
project, by constantly generating new centres and margins through the operation of its
undergirding developmentalist ideology (Wang 2009, 95–98), marches continuously from
Western Europe and North America to East Asia, from the urban to the rural, and from
regions of the dominant populations to those of the Indigenes and ethnic minorities
(Merchant 2003, 2). As it proceeds, it erodes and replaces native Chinese and Indigenous
monistic eco-cosmovisions with Western modernist dualist worldviews. This ideological
transformation has been fueling the rapid urbanization and economic reforms in both
Mainland China and Taiwan since the post-WWII years. As a result, a further deepened
spiritual loss, multi-scalar ecological crises, and human-environmental alienation keep
afflicting marginalized communities whose livelihoods remain inextricable from their
increasingly fragile relationships to local ecosystems.
Set against this context, this research seeks understandings of the rising Indigenous and
5
Traditional territory refers to an expansive area in the mountain forest including the tribal settlement, farmlands, hunting
ground, ritualist sites, relics of ancient tribal settlements where the spirits of the ancestors of Indigenous populations dwell,
and the habitats of multiple natural Gods as well as mythical beings (Yao and Chen 2012).
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native ecological consciousness in today’s art in Greater China as critiques of and
counterstrategies against the modernist project of imperial, as well as internal, colonization of
marginalized human and other-than-human worlds. Specifically, it intends to answer several
overarching questions:
On the with-case level
• What eco-cosmovisions, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (hereafter TEK), Indigenous
Lifeways, and politically ecological critiques are articulated by the works examined?
• What Indigenous or native artistic traditions and quotidian practices are incorporated into
contemporary art and media landscapes through the practices in focus?
• How are the original socio-communal functions of these traditions transformed or
reworked into the politics of aesthetics6 when they enter the spheres of contemporary art
conceptualization, production, display, circulation, and articulation?
• What is the political-aesthetical efficacy of these works in the broader spheres where
environmental activism, Indigenous and rural communal actions, and ecocultural identity
politics take place?
On the cross-case level
• How do the above factors shape the unique characteristics of ecologically concerned art
in Greater China with respect to its visual-textual languages, narrative perspectives,
methodologies of practices,7 and aesthetical as well ethical dispositions?
• What new conceptualization of ecological media and Indigenous media may an
6
Aesthetics is essentially politics as, according to Rancière, it denotes the coordinating system of distributing the “sensible
fabric and intelligible form” that determines what modes of production, perception, thought, and articulation are considered
practices or works of art in a particular society (Rancière 2012, ix, 2006, 82).
7
By methodologies, I mean techniques, skills, modes of production and collaboration, or strategies of display, circulation,
and articulation, among others.
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identification of the above characteristics generate?
• How may the examined works elicit new modes of production that re-negotiate with
artistic modernity in Greater China, which has been so far largely modelled on the
essentially anthropocentric establishments of European and North American modern and
contemporary art?
To answer these questions, this research conducts a collective case study that examines
methodologically pioneering artistic practices in the field to illuminate and unpack the
theoretical dimensions afore delineated. At the same time, it invokes analytical strategies
offered by interdisciplinary political ecology, ecocultural identity politics,8 and
anthropological as well as folk studies of Indigenous traditions in Great China. For the data
collection, I will conduct relational ethnography, in addition to other data sources commonly
included in the case study approach (Yin 2003, 86), to foster my understanding of the “fields
of relations” (Desmond 2014) from which the meanings of works of art stem.
Overall, the research aims to offer a lens into the unique characteristics and underlying
momentum of contemporary art’s ecological turn in Greater China as distinguished from that
in Anglophone contexts. In addition, it intends to make a modest contribution to the
establishment of ecological and East Asian post-colonial critiques as an intervention in extant
critical theory paradigms undergirding art history and criticism today. In presenting these
expected outcomes, the research hopes to bring ecologically concerned arts in Greater China
into dialogue with art practices in other time-places that undertake similar goals to counter
8
Ecocultural identity is an emergent theory of identity politics that emphasizes that the human physiological positions in the
environment and cultural meaning production concerning the environment are inextricable and carry equal weight in shaping
the individual and collective identities (Parks 2020). In section 3.3, I explain the necessity to include ecocultural identity
analyses into the conceptualization of Indigeneity.
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the hegemonic modernist enterprise.
The following sections of this proposal present a brief review of literature, an
introduction to the research design and methods, synopses of the dissertation chapters, and a
bibliography of key texts relevant to this project.
2. Literature review
The review of literature covers three topics central to this research: ecologically concerned
art, political ecology, and indigeneity. Section 3.1 discusses the major art historical and
methodological concerns raised by the recent studies of ecologically concerned art, the
regional specificities of the discipline in Greater China, and the gap targeted by the current
research. Section 3.2 provides an overview of ecologically informed critical theories with an
emphasis on the normative practices of political ecology, based on which it explains the
bearings of these theories on the understanding of ecologically concerned art. Section 3.3
builds up a criterial-relational framework for conceptualizing indigeneity in the contemporary
world. Following this, the section lists four ecological theses central to this conceptualization
of indigeneity and discusses the regional particularities of indigeneity in Greater China.
2.1 Ecological art history: the canon, its recent expansion, and regional specificities
Broad issues raised by canonical Anglophone studies of ecological art
“Ecological art,”9 first emerging in North America and Europe in the 1960s, is now
9
Ecological art and its shorted form “eco-art” or “eco art” are generally used interchangeably (Cheetham 2018). The current
research follows the same practice. For ecological art is a term associated with Euro-North American contemporary art, I use
the expression “ecologically concerned art” to refer to historical art or contemporary artistic practices that do not easily fit
into the canonical category of ecological art in the Western contexts.
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extensively practiced and exhibited worldwide. Although the term encompasses a wide range
of contemporary practices concerned with ecology, it generally denotes visual arts that
“investigate the interconnected environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relationships
between human and nonhuman animals as well as inanimate materials” (Cheetham 2018, 1).
The study of ecological art as a subject of art history began in the early 1970s and became
prominent in the 1990s in response to artistic practices that distinctively differentiated
themselves from the historical categories of Earthwork and environmental art by
incorporating strategies of sustainability, biodiversity, interdependence, environmental
activism, community engagement, and resources management, and ecological science and
engineering (Kagan 2013, 271–73).
In the ongoing processes of historicization and theorizing ecological art practices, some
major scholarly works recently published are dedicated to the topology of the field through
taxonomical approaches (Weintraub 2012; Brown 2014; Kagan 2014). They have provided a
matrix of parameters for the conception, description, and analysis of ecologically concerned
art in general. Considering the discrete nature of these studies, I summarized these major
findings into a table divided into four categories: strategies, conceptual orientations,
axiological convictions, and anticipations for continuous reference during this research (see
Appendix I).
The topological studies are not the end but the onset of the study of art-ecology
relationships for several reasons. Foremost, the term “ecology” encompasses such a wide
range of meanings that include, non-exhaustively, “environment, relationships between
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organism and environment, thinking, and being as interconnections, coexistence and
belonging” (Cazeaux 2018, 9) that continuously evolve with ecologically related disciplines
across social sciences and humanities.10 Ecologically concerned art practices and theories are
thus exposed to infinite possibilities. Meanwhile, while previous scholarly publications,
online archives, and networks of ecological art11 have predominantly focused on Western
European and North American practices, studies of and in Global South and pan-Asian
regions are now emerging to offer new historical, theoretical, and practical methods in the
transregional discussions of art and ecology.
Correspondingly, recent studies in the field have demonstrated more interdisciplinary
approaches and attentiveness to regional specificities that have parted with preceding
taxonomical method largely focusing on the supposedly universal classification of eco-art
through various parameters. The following paragraphs accordingly mention the leading
methodological advancements in the field that have informed the current study.
Ecological art in expansion and its bearing on art history
The 120th issue of Third Text, which came out in 2013, marked a methodological
breakthrough in the study of art and ecology by promoting a radically interdisciplinary
approach and drawing attention to relevant practices in the global south. It presented an array
of decentering, decolonial, and interdisciplinary methods including political ecology,
10
Originally defined in the late 19th century by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel as the scientific study of the relationship
between different living organisms as well as between organisms and their surrounding abiotic environment (R. L. Smith and
Pimm 2019), the concept of ecology has been greatly expanded by social scientists and humanity scholars, leading to
disciplines that undertake diverse onto-epistemological convictions including but not limited to political ecology,
ethnoecology, ecopsychology, deep ecology, and philosophical discourses like dark ecology. Ecological art, theoretically, can
incorporate methods and concepts from these diverse disciplines.
11
Some exemplary eco-art networks and archival sources are listed in Green Arts Web (http://www.greenarts.org/).
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interdisciplinary sciences, cultural studies, Indigenous cosmologies, environmental and
climate justice activisms, as well as ecologically informed critical theories and philosophies
such as speculative realism and new materialism (Demos 2016, 8).
The theoretical and geographical horizons broadened by this publication were furthered
by a special issue of The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (hereafter JCCA) published in
2017. In shedding light on art and ecology in East Asia for the first time, it calls for attention
to be paid to practices of ecologically concerned art in the region, the introduction of non-
modern and pre-modern East Asian thought systems as alternative metaphysical models to
what Bruno Latour summarizes as the “‘nature versus culture’ binarism” (2009, 1) that ungird
Western modernism, and the incorporation of ecological thinking into the critical theories
cluster which art history relies upon (Zheng and Lee 2016).
The propositions made in the special issue are echoed by Eco-Art History in East and
Southeast Asia, published in 2019 as the first edited book featuring historical and
contemporary ecologically concerned art in pan-Asian regions. In juxtaposing historical and
contemporary cases in China, British Malaya, the Korean Peninsula, Philippines, and
Thailand, the collection reveals the continuities and discontinuities in the condition and mode
of artistic engagement with ecology in Asia before and after the advent of modernization. It
accordingly complicates regional artistic practices today as a field of spatial-temporal
ruptures and confluences for they are shown to be inevitably nested in the globalized art
world and ecological conditions while partly defined by local legacies. The anthology has
brought up another important theoretical concern suggested by art historian De-nin Lee: not
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only has ecology become a new theoretical paradigm in art history, it essentially disturbs the
anthropocentric perspective of art history as a whole (Lee 2019).
The above methodological dispositions including interdisciplinarity, the invocation of
Indigenous and non-modern metaphysics, attentiveness to emerging regional practices, and
critical reflections on art history as a human enterprise have informed the conceptual framing
of the current research. In particular, this study adopts the concepts of political ecology and
indigeneity as critical vantage points of observation for its investigation of emergent
ecologically concerned arts in Greater China.
Emerging studies of ecologically concerned art in China
Since the publication of the aforementioned issue of JCCA, several brief surveys have
provided primary historicization and analyses of the genesis, methods, and theoretical-
aesthetic dispositions of ecologically concerned art in China.
Historically, the category in China emerged mainly in the private setting of the artists’
studio in the 1990s. At the time, the effects and consequences of the first-round
socioeconomic reform in post-socialist China that started in the late 1970s began to surface in
a landscape of floating populations, drastic urban transformations, and environmental
degradations (T. Smith, Enwezor, and Condee 2008, 295). This domestic transformation was
met by a new round of globalization since the end of the Cold War and the defeat of the
modernist avant-garde of Chinese art in 1989. Under these circumstances, “ecology,” as a
retrospectively constructed concept was mainly embodied in an environmental consciousness
that grew out of Chinese artists’ reflections and responses to the everyday conflictual
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experiences between individuals and surroundings (Yang 2019; Brunner 2018, 404).
Correspondingly, ecologically concerned art in China has hardly formed a coherent
movement with strategies, organizations, or claims that allows it to reach the broader social
spheres beyond the studio space.
As Yang Jing, one leading researcher in the field, has observed, environmental and
ecological concerns in contemporary Chinese art have been mainly expressed through studio-
based practices of painting, photography, installations, and performances. Correspondingly,
cross-discipline collaborations and engagement with the broader socio-ecological systems
that typically characterize ecological art in Western Europe and North America are rarely
seen in local practices until recently. Yang accordingly suggests that there is no ecological art
but “quasi-ecological art”12 in Mainland China (2019). Meanwhile, the theoretical and
aesthetic uniqueness of Chinese artists’ approaches is observed in a disposition to invoke the
pictorial models of ancient Chinese landscapes as well as non-modern Chinse cosmovision
and aesthetics as counterstrategies against the continuing modernization and industrialization
processes in the country (Yang 2019; Lee 2019, xxii).
The above observations suggest that ecological approaches by artists from different
regions may vary not only thematically according to their surrounding socio-environmental
circumstances but also methodologically according to the ecocultural and intellectual
resources available to them. Thus, an investigation of ecologically concerned art from
Indigenous perspectives in Greater China is expected to generate theorization of models
alternative to those established in Europe-North American practices. Meanwhile, while the
12
In Chinese original: “類生態藝術.”
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above-delineated studio practices constitute valuable subjects of research, the current study
pays attention to the recent evolvement in the field, namely post-studio practices that are
observed to have ventured beyond the representative regime of art through experimenting
with interspecies relationships and reaching out for socio-environmental engagement and
activism (Yang 2019). In Taiwan, a similar expansion of ecologically concerned art is
saliently observed at the intersection of environmental activism, social scientific studies of
socio-environmental problems, and extant socially engaged as well as community-based
artistic practices.13
Due to the lack of historical distance and the nascent state of these practices,
contextualization and theorization of this diverse body of works are yet to be conducted.
Considering the same challenge post to the present research, this study aims at studying the
methodologically pioneering practices rather than conducting a comprehensive historical
survey of the field. Meanwhile, its conceptual framing of the artistic phenomenon in focus is
informed by the following convictions based on the previous review. First, the body of post-
studio art concerned with ecology marks major shifts in how contemporary Chinese artists
conceptualize “ecology” and embody human-environment as well as art-ecology
relationships. This research thus gives equal emphasis to unpacking the ecological thinking of
these artists and exploring how ecological engagement shape the formal and aesthetic
textures of their works. Second, I suggest that ecologically concerned art in Greater China
and broader Asian regions is, rather than a given subject, a heterogeneous field that invites
constant reconfigurations through vivid theoretical engagement. The following sections
13
See footnote 3.
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accordingly present the two major critical dimensions intended by this research: political
ecology and indigeneity.
2.2 Conceptualizing art through interdisciplinary theories of political ecology
An overview of ecologically informed critical theories
In T.J. Demos’ introduction to the 120th issue of Third Text, the art historian and theorist
advocates for the potencies of politico-ecological theories in the study of ecologically
concerned art. In particular, he suggests four theoretical paradigms with which art history and
criticism may engage. These include Guattari's tripartite eco-ontology comprising the
subjective, social, and environmental registers, Marxist cultural geography that emphasizes
the essential role played by the commodification of environmental resources in global
neoliberalist projects, Bruno Latour’s proposition of the post-nature politics of radical
equality across humans, other-than-human beings, as well as abiotic matters, and climate
justice activism claiming for the rights of nature against corporate ownership (Demos 2013).
I consider these four paradigms above through three levels of politico-ecological theory.
The first is interdisciplinary political ecology that combines natural sciences with political
economy, as represented by Marx’s theory. The second are eco-ontologies represented by
Latour and Guattari’s philosophical propositions. As suggested in section 3.1, these
Francophone and Anglophone ontological propositions are potentially joined by East Asian
and Indigenous metaphysics, which also offer non-dualist ontological grounds that challenge
the Western modernist division of nature and culture. The third is environmental activism as
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political ecology in-action. As discussed in section 3.3, such practices are also central to the
formation of Indigenous identity politics today.
The following paragraphs expand the current discussion of the three levels of politico-
ecological theory with explanations of how they may inform ecologically concerned art
analysis.
Art as practices of interdisciplinary political ecology: convictions and analytical methods
Interdisciplinary political ecology – in contrast with the apolitical ecology that studies the
relations of organism to other organisms and its surrounding environment (R. L. Smith and
Pimm 2019) – is an enterprise encompassing “a community of practice” revolving around the
production of certain texts that address the dynamics of socio-environmental systems with
explicit considerations how these changes are affected by human politics and economies
(Robbins 2012, 20). A shared premise thus underlies the multifarious practices of political
ecology across social sciences and environmental humanities: socio-environmental processes
are inextricable from human politico-economic activities that operate through while
consolidating existing power structures of hierarchy. Political ecology accordingly contends
that the benefits and consequences of human-environmental interactions are unequally
distributed among the actors and regions (Robbins 2012, 19–20).
Contemporary ecologically concerned art often aligns with the normative goals and
epistemological conviction of interdisciplinary political ecology. In particular, art practices
focused by this research, which engage with Indigenous and native perspectives of Great
China, place post-colonial critiques of the domestic and external domination over
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environmental and human populations at the center of their ecological approach. Art practices
as such can therefore be read as a creative form of political ecology and works of art
accordingly become a peculiar type of “text” intended by political ecology.
Correspondingly, contextualization and analysis of such works may have recourse to
the narrative strategies and explanatory models offered by political ecology studies. For
instance, five major theses of political ecology have been well established: degradation and
marginalization, conservation and control, co-constitutive ecological conflicts and social
exclusion, the formation of ecocultural identity, subjectivity and social assemblies through
ecological practices,14 and multi-species actants and agents as players in the politics of
ecology (Robbins 2012). They provide multiple routes into the historical and regional
contextualization of artistic practices, the descriptive and interpretive analyses of the
ecological concerns, strategies, and propositions either embedded or foregrounded through
the works of art, as well as considerations of the socio-environmental implications of art
projects.
Meanwhile, the conceptualization of art as visual-textual practices of political ecology
posts queries on ecologically concerned art as a peculiar means, medium, and format of
knowledge production, representation, and circulation alternative to academic practices. The
consideration of what this peculiarity indicates provides a basis to discuss how art politicizes
ecological inquiries and – in turn – how these politics shape the eco-aesthetics embodied in
material works of art. In the case studies, I will bring these issues of concern into the analyses
14
This thesis contends that, rather than that extant modes of identity politics and social assemblies determine individuals and
groups’ relationships with the environment, the changes in environmental actions, behaviors, and systems lead to the
formation of new identity politics and social assemblies. This contention echoes with the relational framework of indigeneity
discussed in section 3.3.
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of the artistic languages as well as the exhibitory, spatial rendering, and discursive strategies
of specific works.
Eco-ontologies
Various propositions of eco-ontologies have stemmed from diverse disciplines beyond the
above-delineated scope of political ecology. Generally, they offer alternative models that
disrupt the dualist worldview that separates “nature” and “culture.”
The category encompasses philosophical speculations to theoretical models grounded in
empirical research in worlds in and out of Western modernity.15 These politico-ecological
ontologies meet with the undergirding goal of ecologically concerned art which, as artist and
theorist Kepes Gyorgy already had observed in the early 1970s, expects to play a formative
role in the re-establishment of a human-environmental relationship when the modern world
found itself at the threshold of ontological reorientation due to the accumulated
environmental disasters, the complication of socio-environmental systems brought by
technological and biogenetic evolvement, and the resulting spiritual lost (1972, 3–4).
Theories of eco-ontologies thus provide a basis to discuss how alternative worldviews
inform, shape, or are being shaped by and revealed through artistic strategies.
Meanwhile, the current research draws attention to eco-ontologies that remain less
visible than those established by the Anglophone and Francophone scholars, namely non-
modern East Asian and Indigenous metaphysics. In particular, it incorporates a regional
15
For example, apart from new materialisms and post-nature politics previously mentioned, it can include Indigenous
worldviews such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism summarized out of his studies of Amazonian cultures
(Castro 2015) and Descola’s quadripartite model that maps out the relations between humans and other-than-humans in
different communities basing on a coordinate plane woven out physicality and interiority as the variables (Descola 2013).
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conceptualization of Indigeneity its conceptual framework (see section 3.3). As recently
suggested by art historians and theorists, ancient Chinese philosophies that embody
relational, holistic cosmovisions in concepts such as “Dao” and “qi” (Zheng and Lee 2016,
216–17) may constitute new models of “eco-aesthetics.”16 Meanwhile, as Indigenous
cosmovisions in varied time-places are now being introduced into various disciplines to offer
alternative ontological grounds (Cameron, Leeuw, and Desbiens 2014), it is timely to join
these interventions from the regional perspectives of art and indigeneity in Greater China.
Political ecology practiced through activism
As acknowledged by academic researchers, the largest body of political ecology worldwide
today is being conducted outside academia through writings, creative projects, and activisms
by those who do not feel the need to claim themselves as political ecologists or only consider
political ecology as one dimension of their work (Robbins 2012). Informed by this
observation, this research attends to how ecological concerned art practices constitute a form
of activism, how they mobilize, seek collaboration with, or are being inspired by local actions
carried by various agents such as individual, communities, or organization like NGOs.
Meanwhile, it should also be acknowledged that in the contexts of Mainland China and
many other East Asian regions, the alliance between art and activisms are not saliently
observable as in other areas of the Global South. It is, therefore, necessary to bring into
consideration the embedded forms and micro levels of local actions and Indigenous
16
To weld ecology and aesthetics, I should spend a few words on the latter term as ecology has been explained in previous
sections. Aesthetic is understood in the current context as not a subdivision of philosophy that studies the sensory
experiences revolving around the art object or a set of theories of art. Rather, it is a coordinating system of distributing the
“sensible fabric and intelligible form” that determines what modes of production, perception, thought, and articulation are
considered practices or works of art in a particular society (Rancière 2006, 82; Ranciere 2012, ix). The reconfiguration of
eco-ontologies theoretical alters this system of aesthetics in which art operates.
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movements.
2.3 Indigeneity: conceptualization, ecological dimensions, and regional specificities
Conceptualizing indigeneity: two basic frameworks
As briefly mentioned in previous sections, bringing Indigenous perspectives into the research
of ecologically concerned art has two major implications. The first is to decenter ecological
art and decolonize political ecology by moving away from the Euro-North American canons
(Loftus 2019, 172–74). The second is to overcome and disrupt the ideological dualism and
spatio-temporal linearity of modernity by seeking alternative eco-ontological and practical
models from Indigenous worlds.
Two major frameworks for conceptualizing indigeneity in academia and regulatory
processes have been established by relevant studies in the past three decades. Despite the
variety of the terms whereby scholars address this distinguishment, it can be generally
summarized as the criterial model versus the relational model or, correspondingly, the geo-
cultural versus the sociopolitical (Radcliffe 2017; Merlan 2009; Gerharz, Uddin, and
Chakkarath 2018).
In particular, the criterial or the geo-cultural framework stems from the original
connotation of the “indigenous,” namely being the descendants of the original inhabitants in a
particular place (Baird 2020; Beckett 2015). This framework thus contends that a
population’s belonging, attachment, and identification to particular lands, places, spaces,
ethnicities, and cultures are the key determinants of its indigenous status (Gerharz, Uddin,
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and Chakkarath 2018; Merlan 2009). By the extension of this, it grounds indigeneity in
conditions that typically manifest the “non-western culture-natures” (Radcliffe 2017)
supposedly inherent to those who can be identified as Indigenous Peoples.
In contrast, the relational or the sociopolitical analytical model frames indigeneity in
relation to their “others” including, mainly, the modern nation-states, colonial apparatuses,
and the dominant populations. Such an approach indicates that Indigeneity, far from being a
natural category, is rhetorically constructed and constantly transformed by socio-political
processes. On the one hand, contemporary Indigenous status is often acknowledged by the
settler-colonial or post-colonial nation-states who selectively endorse specific qualities as the
indicators of the indigenous status. Indigeneity thus becomes inevitably bound up with the
interests of the dominant populations, who through the processes of selection produce
“modalities of humanitarian governance” over and “regimes of managing” the Indigenous
Peoples (Radcliffe 2017). On the other hand, politicized, emancipatory, and subaltern
indigeneity may be acquired through Indigenous Peoples’ negotiations with, resistant against,
and “moral claims on” various hegemonic enterprises of historical and ongoing colonization,
marginalization, and oppression (Merlan 2009).
The current research considers both the criterial and the relational analyses as
indispensable for the conceptualization of today’s Indigeneity. That is to say, whereas I
invoke some persistent conceptions of Indigeneity, I also pay attention to their situated
manifestations and transformations. The following section introduces some ecologically
concerned concepts offered by Indigenous studies framed under this combined model. These
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keywords provide a preliminary understanding of the intrinsic connections between
ecological and Indigenous discussions today and available analytical methods.
Key ecological terms in Indigenous studies
A. Indigenous metaphysics: cosmologies and ontologies
Studies at the intersection of Indigenous traditions and ecology suggest that Indigenous
societies around the world are characterized by a “seamless cosmology-cum-economy” that
see human communities, material environment, and the worlds of spirits as co-inhabitants in
the holistic Indigenous worlds (Grim 2001, xxxiv). This cosmovision accords with a monist
ontology, lying at the center of various Indigenous nature-cultures, that does not distinguish
mind from matter. Under such Indigenous worldviews, all things, including humans and
other-than-human beings, whether biotic or abiotic, are animate, sentient, and perceptive
(Milion 2017, 98–99).
Such animist worldviews and monist ontologies have shaped the socioeconomic,
ecological, and spiritual activities in Indigenous communities, where the secular versus
sacred division is largely absent in everyday life (Grim 2001). In particular, Indigenous
knowledges, accumulated through corporal experiences, visual observations, and various
human-environment relationships, are thus essentially knowledges of negotiating and living
in kinship with varied sentient entities in Indigenous homelands (Milion 2017). These
knowledges are then practiced in Indigenous lifeways and passed on through oral traditions.
They are accordingly inseparable from the lived experiences of Indigenous groups and
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individuals as well as Indigenous territories co-inhabited by humans, non-human beings,
ancestral spirits, and other stakeholders in local ecosystems (Milion 2017).
As suggested in the previous section, the above homogenous depiction of Indigenous
worldviews should be balanced with scrutinization of variances and transformations of
Indigenous conditions in different regions and times. It nevertheless offers a preliminary
understanding of an intrinsic affinity between Indigenous worlds and ecology. Meanwhile,
though the unalienable nature of Indigenous knowledges brings methodological concerns to
academic attempts to institutionalize and abstract them, it is practical to invoke the following
ecologically concerned intellectual resources to illuminate the contexts and characteristics of
the artistic practices investigated by this research.
B. Indigenous Ecological Knowledges
Increasingly more academic disciplines have begun to seek in Indigenous Ecological
Knowledge (hereafter IEK)17 alternative models of environmental resource management. As
summarized by political ecologist Nicolas Houde, studies of IEK generally follow six threads
including “factual observations, management systems, past and current land uses, ethics and
values, culture and identity,” and, undergirding these five, cosmology (2007). As mentioned
aforementioned, studies of world religions and ecology (Miller, Yu, and van der Veer 2014;
Evelyn and John 2001) as well as research on Indigenous traditions and ecology have offered
insights into Indigenous cosmologies worldwide. In particular, the role of religions and
spiritual practices in Indigenous Peoples’ negotiation with multi-scalar challenges brought by
Indigenous Ecological Knowledge is also known as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Local Ecological
17
Knowledge (LEK).
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colonial modernization continues to be one major issue of scholarly interest in the field (Grim
2001). Meanwhile, the rest five categories of IEK are being investigated by diverse
disciplines including political ecology, anthropology, ethnoecology, and ethnoscience18 (Inglis
1993, 1–2).
While these studies mainly aim at applying IEK to pharmacology, botany, agriculture,
and the conservation, (co-)management, risk estimation of environmental resources, the
current research takes interest in mainly how these categories of IEK enter and condition the
production of contemporary art as narrative, representative, and performative components.
These six aspects of IEK thus provide basic observation points for the case analyses.
C. The Indigenous land
The land bears both metaphysical and material-sociopolitical significance for Indigenous
worlds. As afore-delineated, belonging to homelands and relationships among all sentient
beings co-inhabit the land are the central discourses in the criterial analyses of Indigeneity
regardless of differences in the genesis stories of Indigenous communities around the world
(Gerharz, Uddin, and Chakkarath 2018). The land is accordingly a major source of
intellectual, figurative, and literal power in Indigenous nature-cultures (Teves, Smith, and
Raheja 2015, 59–61).
As Indigenous lands often sit on territories rich in environmental resources and
perceptive to climate change disasters, they are disproportionally inflicted with the
18
Ethnoecology studies “the conceptions of ecological relationships held by a people or a culture”; ethnoscience studies
“systems of knowledge developed by a given culture to classify the objects, activities, and events of its universe” (Inglis
1993).
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consequences of industrial extraction, state-led dispossession, and ecological crises. Local
movements fighting for land stewardship and visibility in environmental politics that arise
accordingly often invoke the rhetoric of indigeneity as a political resource. This strategy has
promoted land and environmental justice as one major framework of transnational
indigeneity,19 allowing for alliances among diverse Indigenous, non-Indigenous activist, rural,
and other disenfranchised communities worldwide (Tsing 2007, 39–42). Moreover, in regions
where the identification of Indigenous populations remains largely contentious20 this
strategical invocation of indigeneity has played a central role in contextualizing Indigenous
identity politics locally and fermenting the process of “becoming Indigenous” among those
are portraited by the dominant societies as socio-politically, culturally, and economically
subaltern (Tsing 2007).
Following the above discussion, the chapter breakdown briefly touches upon how
encounters between Indigenous or rural lands in Greater China and the erosive processes of
modernization have engendered criticality and politicalness of the works of art in focus.
Meanwhile, it will also introduce how land-based Indigenous metaphysics have shaped the
representative, narrative, performative, and spatial strategies of these works.
D. Ecocultural identity
The affinity between indigeneity and Indigenous lands suggests that ecology, in addition to
ethnic, sociocultural, and political factors, plays a constitutive role in Indigenous identity
19
According to Anna Tsing, other two major frameworks for transnational Indigeneity are “rhetorics of sovereignty,” which
applies mainly to settler-colonial places, and narrative of pluriethnic and multicultural autonomy.
20
These regions include Southeast and East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In section 3.3, I will discuss the contestations
over indigeneity and Indigenous Peoples in these regions, with an emphasis on Greater China.
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politics. To explicate this model of identification and its expressions in art and cultural forms,
the current research adopts the concept and analytical framework of ecocultural identity.
The notion of ecoculture “discursively recognizes the intertwining, inextricability, and
constant co-influence of cultural and ecology” (Parks 2020, 103). Additionally, ecocultural
identity theories contend that “all identities have earthly constitutions and forces” that hold
equal significance to their sociocultural constituents (Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor 2020,
xviii; emphasis in original). In other words, the human-environmental relationship plays a
formative role in shaping the self-identification and cultural belongings of not only
Indigenous Peoples but all humans, including even that of extractive capitalists. In turn,
various ecocultural identities manifest different modes of human-environment relationships
held by individuals and societies. Among these, diverse Indigenous identities comprise a
paradigm in which humans acquire selfhood in affinity with the Earth.
Echoing the criterial-relational framework of indigeneity, ecocultural identity analyses
further explicate that it is no longer sufficient to base the identification of Indigenous Peoples
solely on discourses such as sociopolitical sovereignty, ethnic diversity, and linguistic or
cultural autonomy, which have been largely incorporated into states’ regulatory projects.
While self-identification – rather than definitive terms like ethnicity or continued inhabitation
in ancestral lands – is suggested the primary determinator of being Indigenous by the United
Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, human-environmental relationships and
ecocultural modalities play a key role in this self-identification.
Contextualizing Indigeneity in Greater China
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Section 3.1 and 3.2 have framed the conceptualization of contemporary indigeneity in a
combined criterial-relational model and listed four key ecological theses – Indigenous
metaphysics, IEK, Indigenous land, and ecocultural identity – central to this conception. This
model prepares for discussing indigeneity and its varied manifestations in Greater China
where the notion is received heterogeneously.
The term indigenous has only been applied to the identification of human populations
since the mid-20th Century. The contemporary notion of indigeneity, situated largely within
the human socio-politics since then, was largely shaped by transnational Indigenous
movements since the early 1980s and the endorsement of Indigenous rights under varied legal
framework across the globe (Gerharz, Uddin, and Chakkarath 2018). Against such
background, indigeneity often indicates adherence to traditions and resistances against the
total taken-over of colonial modernity as well as being peripheralized and underprivileged by
the dominant society (Beckett 2015).
However, such an understanding of indigeneity and its corresponding identification of
Indigenous Peoples are not globally homogenous categories in theory or practice. Though
these terms are widely recognized in former settler colonies including Americas, Australia,
and New Zealand, they remain largely contested in Southeast and East Asia – as in some part
of Africa and the Middle East – as peoples in these regions have not been massively displaced
and replaced by European settler colonizers (Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
Division for Social Policy and Development, and Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on
Indigenous Issues 2009, 6; Beckett 2015; Milion 2017; Tsing 2007). Many governments in
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Asian countries, including China, thus have denied the applicability of the concept of
indigeneity under their administration. In substitution, “ethnic minority” is often invoked as a
politically eclectic concept to refer to communities other than the dominant social groups in
an attempt to established multicultural discourses (Hathaway 2016; Beckett 2015).
Under this circumstance, “Indigenous Peoples” in post-socialist China, as a legal term,
an identity, or socio-cultural practice, is not officially recognized since the central
government had denied the validity of the concept of Indigenous rights to the United Nations
Commission on Human Rights in 1995 (Sturgeon 2007, 130). Instead, China claims itself to
be a territory of, rather than Indigenous Peoples and latecomers, multiple ethnicities
(Hathaway 2016) including the majority group of Han Chinese and fifty-five ethnic minority
groups (c. 少數民族).21 The latter groups are generally marginalized socioeconomically,
politically, and cultural-ideologically in both modern and imperial China (Hathaway 2016).
Historically, though cultural transference has long been taking place among different
ethnic groups including the Han Chinese, such integration was “weighed in favour of the
absorption of Han traits.” Meanwhile, such cultural assimilation was often accompanied by
the Han Chinese occupation of “agriculturally richer low land” originally inhabited by ethnic
minorities through economic competitions, forcing the latter group to retrieve into
mountainous areas (Unger 1997, 68). Processes as such have been greatly accelerated since
the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, particularly through the building
of state farms, plantations, grassroots Party organizations, and the promotion of Mandarin in
education programs (Unger 1997). Overall, the accelerated erosion of the lifeways of ethnic
21
“少數民族” is sometimes translated as “minority nationality” in English, which is inaccurate as the Chinese government
does not consider “民族” as nationality.
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minorities goes hand in hand with the histories of changing land and property policies,
industrialization, and urbanization in Maoist and post-socialist China, which are also deemed
by political ecologists as the major cause of ecological degradation in the country today (Yeh
2015).
Meanwhile, since the early 1990s, the concept of “Indigenous Peoples”22 has been
gradually established as an academic and legal designation for aboriginal inhabitants in
Taiwan, who are also known as the Taiwanese Austronesians (Ma 2013, 13–14). The official
recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan have been the result of an array of
Indigenous movements from the 1970s to the present day, most of which have revolved
around protestations against the governmental land regulatory policies and Sinicization
processes since the establishment of Kuomingtang regime in 1949. In particular, three rounds
of “Return Our Lands” (c. 還我土地運動) movements took place in 1988, 1989, and 1993,
which began the history of systematically organized Indigenous rights movements across the
island. The movements targeted the reclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty over their
ancestral lands, which had been put under the surveillance of the “Aboriginal Reservation
Land System” inherited by the Kuomingtang government from the Japanese rule (Chen 1998,
12–13). The environmental consciousness foregrounded in the land justice movements was
sustained and expanded through Indigenous populations’ continuous fights for the rights to be
involved in resource and environmental management and their struggles against the
corporates’ exploitation of wildlife resources, rampant tourism, illegal deforestation, the
destruction of tribal spaces by ecological disasters, as well as continuous encroachment of
22
In Taiwan, the most widely adopted designation for Indigenous Peoples today is “原住民族.”
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Indigenous lands for massive infrastructure building projects and national parks.23 Overall,
the maintenance of ethnic spaces, traditional terrains (c. 傳統領域),24 and ecocultural
autonomy25 have been the major impetus behind the rise of Indigenous identity politics in
Taiwan and its alignment with internationally Indigenous movements.
The above review lays the sociohistorical contexts for a situated understanding of
indigeneity in Greater China. While the notion of indigeneity can be traced along with the
histories of Indigenous rights movements in Taiwan, the concept may apply to the status of
ethnic minorities and other marginalized rural populations in Mainland China who are not
officially included in the fifty-five ethnic minority groups. In both regions, Indigenes may
refer to those whose ecocultural autonomy has been continuously eroded by Han Chinese
lifestyles and modernization processes. This understanding is echoed by what Andrew Gray
from the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs proposes as a new
conceptualization of indigeneity in the context of Asia, where the identification of Indigenous
Population remains ambiguous. According to Gray, instead of framing indigeneity as the
“remaining” of white settler colonialism, it is more pertinent to think of Indigenous
populations in Asia as those who “have been oppressed by other ethnic groups over history”
(Baird 2016, 502).
23
For example, in 1973, Truku people began to protest against Asia Cement Corporation’s mining project in Xincheng
Mountain near their reservation land; in the early 1980s, Rukai people initiated protests against the government’s plan for the
construction of the Majia Reservoir in Dawu Mountain, which would have flooded their tribe if built; since 1987, Tao
(Dawu) people have been fighting against the State’s usage of their habitat Lanyu (Orchid Island) as the major nuclear waste
storage in Taiwan; for decades Bunun Truku, Atayal, and other Indigenous Peoples have been fighting against the
establishment of National Parks in their lands.
24
Traditional territory refers to an expansive area in the mountain forest inhabited by Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan. It
usually includes the tribal settlement, farmlands, hunting ground, ritualist sites, relics of ancient tribal settlements where the
ancestral spirits dwell, and the habitats of multiple natural Gods as well as mythical beings (Yao and Chen 2012).
25
Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan generally hold a “cultural vision of mountain forest” (c. 山林文化觀), which see Indigenous
cultures as inseparable from the space of traditional terrains.
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To summarize, converging Gray’s proposition and the criterial-relational framework of
indigeneity previously staged, the current research understands indigeneity as the defining
qualities of those whose lifeways are embedded in certain modalities of ecoculture that exist
in confrontation with the modernist “national time and space” (Beckett 2015) of dominant
populations. In focusing on artistic practice informed by such Indigenous perspectives, it
investigates an emerging field of ecologically concerned art in Greater China.
3. Methodology
3.1 Research approach: collective case studies
This research adopts the collective case study approach to explore the transactions between
the practices of contemporary art, political ecology, and Indigeneity in Sinophone contexts.
The primary subjects of study are works and practices of art as well as their activities in
multiple spheres within the contemporary Art World and media culture. These analytical units
will be grouped by case study chapters. The groupings in different chapters may follow
different logics, which echoes with the previously discussed heterogeneous condition of
contemporary art. For example, when a prolific artist has established highly personal
methodologies of practices and accumulated a considerable volume of works, a whole
chapter will center on his or her practices; when it is observed that the works of multiples
artists show affinities in thematic and theoretical interests regarding certain ecological issues
in the same area, these works – ideally conducted as short-term projects – will be grouped in
one chapter; when an array of works is produced through a long-term collaborative program,
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both the works and the program as a whole will be examined in a chapter. Meanwhile, each
case study chapter will include several analytical sectors including descriptive exegeses,
contextualization, theoretical abstraction, and criticism.
Multiple data collection methods (see section 4.2) are implemented throughout the
research process to build an empirical basis for case sampling. Regarding the criteria for case
selection, the studied cases should first correspond to the theoretical framing of the current
research. As previously discussed, the potential of the case in illuminating new theoretical
grounds is of essential importance. More specifically, the practice in focus should
demonstrate methodological stability and complexity; the artist’s engagement with ecological
and Indigenous issues should be critical, authentic, and context-specific. Meanwhile, the
accessibility of research materials, as well as the methodological and theoretical diversities
across the cases, are also considered important.
Lastly, a set of interdisciplinary analytical discourse will be adopted for the case studies
(see section 4.3).
3.2 Data Collection Methods
Stage Sources and methods Types of data

Pre- Online archives including artist websites, social Primary
fieldwork media, exhibition projects websites. Works of art; visual and textual
Offline research archive, exhibitions; artist documentation of works of art and
publications. working processes, artists’ research
writings, existing interviews,
ethnoecological studies, anthropological
and religious studies, visual and literary
materials related to works of art such as
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maps, myths, diagrams.

Secondary
Exegesis of works; curatorial projects
and discourses.
Interviews with artists, project participators,
Primary
producers of Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Interview recordings and transcripts;
(hereafter TEK), collaborating organizations, and
ethnographic fieldnotes; visual
Fieldwork knowledge experts in disciplines related to ecology
documentation that may include photos
and indigeneity in China; direct and participant
or video of production and exhibition
observations of project processes and indigenous
scenes.
environment; ethnographical visual documentation.
The above table lists the data collection methods, sources, and types of materials involved in
the present research.
During the fieldworks, I will interview the artists and their collaborators. The interview
questions will revolve around the backgrounds, methods, rationale, and processes of artistic
production, the artists’ biographies, as well as theoretical discussions related to research
questions. This will be followed by follow-up interviews or textual exchanges.
The fieldwork also aims at collecting materials from and generating a corporeal
understanding of the socioecological and Indigenous environments where the artists work. To
do so, I will visit the artists’ studios, collaborating institutions, and significant project sites.
Informed by the methodology of relational ethnography, I consider these spaces and places as
fields of relations and processes where the artistic practices are gradually established through
contacts between different actants involved, the artists, and their surrounding environments.
These fields of relations as sites of meaning production thus become the subjects of my
quasi-ethnographic inquires (Desmond 2014, 547–48). During the fieldwork, I will make
observations in the following aspects:
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• Points of contact between various actants in the field, with an emphasis on the artists’
role(s);
• How these contacts propel the formation of relational mechanisms that shape the mode,
organization, strategies, and methods of artistic practices;
• The transformation of the actants through the relational mechanism in-formation;
• The relational construction of ecological and Indigenous worldviews and practices.
With these observations, I intend to explore how meanings and values of art are contained in
“a linked constellation of narratives, concepts, and practices” (Desmond 2014) rather than the
final material production.
3.3 Data analyses
Aspects of analyses
Type of analyses Subject of analysis Issues in focus

Textual, visual, Works of art, working methods and Contents expressed,
relational, and processes, strategies of presentation and aesthetic virtuosity and
processual circulation. propensity, politicalness,
criticality and reflexivity
regarding specific themes,
Artist writings and biographies,
ecological, social, or
Contextual ethnographical materials, historical and
communal efficacies,
socio-cultural backgrounds.
authenticity and ethical
righteousness.
A toolkit for analysis
Problems regarding the validity of singular onto-epistemological reading of art arise when
Indigenous visual materials, ritualistic practices, and ways of TEK production are brought
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into contemporary art practices. In seeking understandings of the ritualist constitutions26 in
contemporary art, theorist Cynthia Freeland points out that neither the “art as communal
ritual” nor the art as the transcendent subject of aesthetic and moral judgement offers
satisfactory explanations for such art.27 On one hand, the ritualist reading – in the literal but
not metaphorical sense – fails when the shared worldviews and communal consensus needed
for art to perform ritualist efficacies are eliminated in the contexts of contemporary art. On
the other hand, the latter approach provides little insights into the form-materiality, contents,
and cultural-specific aesthetics of such works, often dismissing them as exotic or even
obscene (Freeland 2003, 2–6, 18–19).
What Freeland quests here is the possibility of combing an anthropological reading of
art as agential objects with socio-communal functions (Gell 1992) and a semiotic, linguistic,
and formal reading of art that does not defy the cross-cultural aesthetic conditions in which
modern and contemporary art is produced and displayed. The same concern lies at the center
of my analytical framework intended here. To make such non-binary analyses possible, I rely
on theoretical scaffolding in three dimensions.
The first considers contemporary art’s capacity of foregrounding and drawing attention
to the animacy, politicalness, and subjectivities of visual and material components in the post-
decontextualization condition of art’s display and circulation, supported by medium-specific
26
Here, the ritualist contents Freeland is referring to can originate from both Indigenous cultures and the European ritualist
lineages in “the Judaeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman” (Freeland 2003).
27
The former explanatory model considers art by its functions in communal activities and symbolic values produced through
“the use of ceremonies, gestures, and artefacts”; the latter one, according to Freeland’s historiographical analysis of
aesthetics theories, stems from David Hume’s contemplation on “taste” as well as the Kantian transcendental aesthetics and
is continued in the formalist approaches taken by major commentators of European-North-American modern art including
Clive Bell, Edward Bullough, and Greenberg (Freeland 2003).
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art-critical theories,28 “new materialisms,”29 and object-oriented theories.30 In bringing
together these analytical discourses, I draw attention to how the materiality of things and
efficacies of visual forms, irreducible to being indexes of human agencies (Gell 1998, 4–5),
are sustained or transformed when travelling from the essential animist Indigenous worlds to
contemporary art scenes.
The second introduces analyses of ritualistic-performative, object-making, visual,
narrative, and quatidian practices in Indigenous cultures into the analytical discourses of art.
In the current research contexts, these would include anthropological and archaeological
studies as well as literary representations of the practices of “diffuse religions” (C. Yang
1991) in mainland China as well as those of various Indigenous traditions in Taiwan. To
contextualize these sources in the current research, I will emphasize the ecological promises
demonstrated through the monist worldviews undergirding them. A list of key texts,
supplemented by canonical studies of Indigenous cosmologies elsewhere around the world
conducted by European-American anthropologies, is accordingly included in the bibliography
of this proposal. Formal discussions of this body of knowledge will be briefly presented in
the introduction chapter and detailed in case studies of the thesis.
The third complicates and politicizes Indigenous status in the contexts of post-socialist
28
For example, moving images’ capacity of re-enchanting the world or giving voice and visibility to the muted and the
concealed.
29
This set of cross-disciplinary analytical paradigms is designated as “new materialism” as it rises at a realization of the
inadequacy of post-structural, text-based analyses, which had once eclipsed the modernist material approach, in providing
explanation and solution for contemporary development of bio-technology, material life, and various ecological and ethical
crises (Coole and Frost 2010, 2–7). Here, it should be noted that new materialisms are hardly new is we take into
consideration that Indigenous metaphysics have always been attributing liveness and personhood to myriad things (Horton
and Berlo 2013, 18). Meanwhile, though some underlying convictions have been laid for the field, an orthodoxy has not yet
been established for new materialisms.
30
Reference may include Harman Graham’s object-based ontology and Bruno Latour’s theorization of the agency of things
in Actor-Network Theory, “parliament of things” addressed in We Have Never Been Modern (1991), and An Inquiry Into
Modes of Existence (2013), Timothy Morton’s “hyperobject.”
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China and postcolonial Taiwan. It looks at the nuances of Indigeneity in the Sionphone
contexts as well as the transactions between today’s Indigenous cultural-ecological practices
and processes of economic-political modernization. To conduct such analyses, I will invoke
major theses of political ecology, critical Indigenous studies, Indigenous ecology, theories of
marginalization,31 some of which have been touched upon in the literature review. I expect to,
with recourse to these analyses, observe whether and how the politics of art and that of
Indigenous practices align in resistance against marginalization backed up by divisions
between ethnicities, “nature” and “culture,” primitive arts and fine arts, as well as pre-modern
and modern.
The above analytical tools will be applied to different subjects of analysis including
those contained in the works of art and the processes by and the context in which they are
created. Also, the analyses will be conducted in a continuous process that spans from
relational-ethnographic investigations to textual and visual studies. Overall, they are adopted
to explain how Indigenous and ecological contents are incorporated into various forms and
mediums of contemporary art at critical points of artistic rendition and, in turn, how
contemporary art offers spaces for liberating Indigenous and other-than-human actants from
the modernist suppression in linguistic and narrative terms.
3.4 Limitation
31
References may include: Robbins, Paul, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition (Hoboken: Wiley-
Blackwell., 2012); Hokowhitu, Brendan, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve
Larkin, eds., Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies (Oxon: Routledge, 2021); Grim, John A., ed., Indigenous
Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by Harvard
University Press for the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2001); Morris, Rosalind. C, ed.
2010, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010);
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As the above analytical strategy is fragmented due to its interdisciplinary bases, my level of
engagement with each theoretical thread will be limited. Accordingly, the research does not
claim to generate major theoretical advancements in a particular field. The main research goal
remains to generate understanding and analytical discourses of the artistic phenomenon in
focus. However, I will place more wright on exploring the bearing of Chinese Indigenous
sources on the conception of ecologically concern art and, more broadly, art-critical methods.
Meanwhile, a more rounded approach to contemporary art studies may emerge in the research
process.
4. Chapter breakdown
Part I Staging the research
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 The nascent practices and scholarship of ecologically concerned art in Greater
China and other East Asian regions
1.2 Theoretical framing: political ecology and Indigeneity as emerging theoretical
paradigms in ecologically concerned art histories and criticism
1.3 Research scope and methodologies
Chapter 2 Continuous modernization in Greater China and its bearings on the ecology
2.1 Continuous modernization and its line of progression
2.2 Spiritual alienation: the consolidation of the nature-cultural division, the
secularization of popular beliefs, and the loss of traditional Chinese eco-vision
2.3 Human-environmental separation through socio-economic developmental
processes
Part II Case studies
Chapter 3 Nuò/Nuó’s Lifeworlds – Mao Chenyu’s re-enchantment of the rural eco-

cosmos
3.1 Earlier ethnographic documentaries: the beginning of Paddy Films
3.2 Critique of rural degradation and spiritual loss through experimental films and
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moving images works

3.3 Restoration of rural ecology and communal lifeworld in Paddy Film Farm
3.4 Techno-shaman and animist objects: material-spirituality in Mao Chenyu’s multi-
media installations
Chapter 4 FROM OUR EYES: cultural-ecological preservation through a community-

engaging documentary program
4.1 Eco-cultural zones of fragility: the project territory of FOE and existing media
cultures in ethnic minority areas in Southwest China
4.2 Model of organization, collaboration, skill training, and production
4.3 Analysis of eco-documentary A
4.4 Analysis of eco-documentary B
Chapter 5 Pulima as the contemporary artist – Sakuliu Pavavaljung’s navigation

between the Indigenous and contemporary art worlds
5.1 Between Indigeneity and contemporaneity: debates over Indigenous art in Taiwan
from the 1990s to the mid-2010s
5.2 The preservation and revitalizations of Paiwan cultural traditions: early practices of
Sakuliu
5.3 Sakuliu’s drawings: storytelling and translation as mnemonic devices of
Indigenous Lifeways
5.4 Sakuliu’s architectural installations: merging the spaces of secular and divine
dwellings
Chapter 6 Restoring homelands – the emerging politics of Indigenous ecology and the
recent evolution of contemporary Indigenous art in Taiwan
6.1 Typhoon Morakot and the disruption of Indigenous spaces
6.2 Etan Pavavaljung: viciking the mountains winds
6.3 Aluaiy Kaumakan: lemikaliking the Indigeous bodies
6.4 Eleng Luluan: mourning for the lost homes
Part III Conclusion
Chapter 7 Conclusion/Epilogue
Chapter 1 Introduction
This section begins with a delineation of the rise of ecologically concerned art and relevant
scholarship in Mainland China and Taiwan and its recent expansion with emerging artistic
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methods. Based on this, I will delimit my research territory to the emerging ecological art
practices in Greater China. This is followed by a summary of existing approaches, critical
perspectives, and analytical instruments for the study of ecologically concerned art offered by
the canonical and expanded European and North American scholarships. Based on this, I will
evaluate the relevance of existing methods for the current research and highlight political
ecology and Indigenous traditions as two critical vantage points which I intend to take in this
research. The last section of the chapter states the research scope and methodologies.
Chapter 2: Hegemonic modernization in Greater China and its bearings on ecology
This chapter situates the recent emergence of ecological consciousness and Indigenous
perspectives in ecologically concerned art in Greater China within a sociohistorical context
and theoretical framework of “hegemonic modernization.” In conceptualizing modernity as a
project that prioritizes developmentalism, this chapter begins with a discussion of how the
developmentalist ideology – in idolizing specific models of modernity such as that of Western
Europe and North America – fuels the demarcation of “the developed” and “the
underdeveloped” between countries and regions, between ethnic groups on the domestic
level, and between different regions within the dominant ethnicity group (Wang 2009). This
demarcation entails that “the underdeveloped” envisions the past and present of “the
developed” as its future and follows the latter’s modernist path, thus perpetuating the
progression of modernity along lines drawn from the “centers” to the “peripheries,” both of
which are continuously generated. Using an arrow to symbolize this process of continuous
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hegemonic modernization, I map its direction of progression with the below expression:
{Western Europe & North American}→{The Greater China [Han Chinese
(dynamics between populations with different regional identities within Han ethnic areas:
e.g. urban→rural )→ethnic minorities/Indigenous]}
This overarching modernization thesis thus allows me to examine the experiences of
Indigenous Peoples, ethnic minorities, and other marginalized populations across different
regions in Greater China today within the same narrative framework and observe where they
stand in the process of modernization. Under this framework, this chapter proceeds to discuss
modernity’s bearings on ecology and how they affect the ecologies on the “margins”
following two threads.
The first is spiritual alienation. In the history of modern China, this process is
manifested in the replacement of the traditional Chinese cosmovision of monism by a dualist
worldview that differentiates nature from human society. From the late 19th century to the
early 20th century, as Darwinian “nature” and social sciences were introduced to China by
imperial and Nationalist intellectuals, “nature” – with its Chinese translation as “ziran” – was
established as “the opposite of ‘civilization,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘skill’” or “a totality of actual
existence, as opposed to ‘spirit’ and ‘history’” (Weller 2006, 43). Meanwhile, the Chinese
intellectuals’ assimilation of social Darwinian thinking of evolution and social scientific
studies of religions led to their degradation of Chinese traditional religions to the status of
superstition (C. Yang 1991). “Attachment to natural objects, animals or the dead” and
reverence to “nature” that are omnipresent in traditional religions are almost effaced from the
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modern belief systems in China (Miller, Yu, and van der Veer 2014). A similar process of the
purification of “nature” and “natural science” is also seen in Taiwan during Japanese and
Kuomintang rule in the presentation of “nature” across various media as a subject of use and
governance, independent from culture and politics (Weller 2006). These historical processes
have lasting impacts on the conception of the human-environmental relationship in Greater
China today.
Second is a human-environmental separation, mobilized by the spiritual alienation that
deepens with economic modernization. In Mainland China, this process is observed in an
array of socioeconomic projects and cultural-political campaigns from the 19th century to the
current day. Among these, two periods, namely the Maoist collectivism and the post-Mao era
of state capitalism that began with the economic reform and opening up in the late 1970s are
deemed by political ecologists to have caused the most severe environmental degradation of
lasting consequences (Yeh 2015). Meanwhile, nation-wide, rapid urbanization has also
speeded up the human-environmental separation. The problem, as pointed by Weller (2006),
runs deeper than socialism or state capitalism as proven by Kuomintang’s economic
development strategies and “massive reengineering of the environment” in Taiwan after
WWII.
In chapter two, I will further this discussion of the two processes through which
modernization alters human-environmental relationships and generates ecological problems
in Greater China by examining their specific historical manifestations related to the case
studies. Meanwhile, I will also discuss how spiritual and environmental alienation, having
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previously affected major urban populations, are now increasingly being experienced by the
populations on the “margins” as modernization deepens. This provides a background for
understanding the rise of ecologically concerned art and justifications for the theoretical
perspectives – political ecology and Indigenous traditions – proposed for the research
framework.
Chapter 3: Indigeneity through mythological writing: Nuò/Nuó’s lifeworld and the re-
enchantment of rural eco-cosmos
In 2003, artist and film maker Mao Chenyu made the feature film Soul Mountain during his
ethnographic investigation of the indigenous lifeways in Shennongjia Forestry District in
Hubei Province. The piece marked the starting point of Mao’s ongoing film and moving
image series “Paddy Film” and set ethnographic-fictional writing as an undergirding method
for his multimedia practices.
After returning from Shennongjia, Mao began to reconstruct the mythological histories
of the profane and divine life of his clan in Yueyang City, Hunan province, through
filmmaking. During this process, he was self-identified by the ethnicity of Nuò (c.糯, a
species of rice paddy of which the name became the signifier of the self-identification of the
agricultural population who first found and grew it) despite his Han ethnicity recognized by
the state. Meanwhile, as a descendent of a Nuóist ritualist performer (c.儺, a traditional
religious ritual established in rural societies of China since the classic periods), who has been
posthumously deified as a major local God of the paddy-growing regions around the
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Dongting Lake nearby the artist’s hometown, Mao expands the conception of indigeneity by
exploring the entangled lifeways of various ancestral, spiritual, multi-species, and geological
presences in his surrounding rural eco-cosmos through the mediation of local ritualist
traditions.
This chapter centers on Mao Chenyu’s practices in three aspects: “Paddy Film” that
consists of more than a dozen works, his local socio-ecological practices at the Paddy Film
Farm since 2012, and his multimedia installation works presented at some major
contemporary art events since 2015.
By analyzing Mao’s representative works including ethnographic documentaries
Between Humans and Gods《細毛家屋場甲申陰陽界》 (2004) and Ximaojia Universe《神衍
像》 (2008-2009), experimental films I Have What? Chinese Peasant War: The Rhetoric to
Justice《擁有，新中國農民戰爭：修辭學的正義》(2010-2013) and Cloud Explosion,
Dongting Lake and The Death of Its Symbols《媒介 1 號，雲爆：洞庭及符號死亡》(2014),
moving image works World Grammar《世界語法》 (2015), Litchi Girl《荔枝姑娘》(2016),
Nuoist Economy《儺教經濟》(2017-2018), Automatic Paddy《自動化稻》 (2018), and
Seeds·Epigraphy《種子·銘文》(2018), the chapter sheds lights on the major theoretical issues
in his film practices such as the re-enchantment of the native monistic universe through
ethnographic films and digital media, political-ecological criticisms of the environmental
degradation and spiritual loss in today’s rural China through the production of visual-textual
essays, and the incorporation of cross-genre filmic languages into moving image works of
contemporary art.
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Meanwhile, it examines the artist’s farming, winemaking, environmental preservation,
and educational practices at the Paddy Film Farm as the communal and eco-infrastructural
basis for his creative projects.
Building upon these, the chapter will provide interpretations of Mao’s multimedia
installations at his major exhibitory projects in which conflations of artist’s films, indigenous
objects, and ritualistic visual-performative elements on the medium-material level introduces
new aesthetic subjects to contemporary Chinese art.
Lastly, this chapter discusses some key methodological concepts proposed by the artist
including, nonexclusively, techno-shamanism, geo-animism, and the pharmacology of art to
bring Mao’s practices into dialogues with critical indigeneity and ecologically informed
critical theories.
Chapter 4: Indigeneity without possessive sovereignty: nomadic experiments in
contemporary Chinese art
In 2019, Mongolian artist Chyanga, who is known by his Han name Qin Ga, exhibited in his
solo show in Tang Contemporary Art three installations works Where Are You Going《去往何
處》（2019), Grassland Fence Project《圍欄計劃》（2014-2019), and Belief《信仰》
（2019), in which he ruminates on the erosion of traditional lifeways of the herders in Inner
Mongolia Autonomous Region by socioeconomic reformations in the pastoral areas in post-
socialist China. The exhibition signifies a thematic and methodological shift in the artist’s
practice towards nomadism after two decades of engagement in the histories of avant-garde
in Chinese contemporary art as well as a return to his Mongolian root in Alxa League.
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The alienation from grassland and indigenous spirituality in earlier life, and the
attempts to reconstitute one’s relation to the pastoral ecoculture through artistic experiments,
is not peculiar to Chyanga. A dozen artists who have been working on the issue in recent
years are involved in the online program “Go Nomadic Together” (c. 一起遊牧), which
Chyanga initiated in June 2020 amid the global outbreak of COVID-19. The program is as
much a survey of nomadic legacies in contemporary art, taking Inner Mongolia as an anchor
point while stretching across ethnicities, regional and national borders, as well as individual
histories, as an exploration of nomadism as a method of alliance built on the physical and
technological infrastructures today.
This chapter, taking nomadism as a theoretical provocation, selectively studies the
works by the participants of “Go Nomadic Together” and other artists with nomadic lineages
in Northern China while having extensively life experience overseas such as NINI Dongnier
(b. 1988), who incorporates the Mongolian ecocultural, cosmological, and artistic legacies in
her choreographic and theatrical practices, Nashun Nashunbatu (b. 1969), whose surrealist
painting explores the human’s relationship to the landscapes and species in the pastoral
regions, and Timur Si-qin (b. 1984), who in his technologically rendered sculptures search for
spiritual resources from Mongolian and Amerindian traditions as remedies for Anthropocene
catastrophes. Through these examinations, the chapter reflects on the bearing of the embodied
experiences of nomadism on the textuality of “indigenous media,” artistic negotiation with
the irrevocable dying out of nomadic life, and its abstraction as well as theorization as a
strategy of resilience in front of contemporary ecological crises.
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More broadly, the chapter explores how nomadism theoretically and strategically
functions as a unique mode of indigeneity that surpasses the division of indigenous
subjectivity by discourses of ethnicity and the construction of modern nation-state. It asks, in
other words, how an indigenous experience shared across various borders is enabled by the
common conception of a non-possessive human-land relationship. This unique mode of being
indigenous potentially offers a line of flight from the neoliberalist or state-governed logic of
possessiveness over land as properties, which global indigenous land movements today often
find themselves both struggling against and inevitably reliant on.
Chapter 5: Indigeneity in the politics of aesthetics: Pulima’s navigation between the
artistic traditions and contemporaneity
Chapter five begins with an overview of the development of Indigenous art in Taiwan from
the early 1990s to the late 2000s, highlighting an antinomy that occurs in the artists’ “search
for artistic modernity” (Lu 2007). On the one hand is the preservation of aboriginal artistic
traditions and the communal functions of art; on the other hand is the pursuit of personal
voices and contemporary artistic languages. In illuminating major theoretical issues that have
emerged in these debates, this sections also sets the background for examining Sakuliu
Pavavaljung’s works focused in the current chapter – only after the early 2010s have works
by contemporary Indigenous artist in Taiwan gained wider attention in the mainstream Art
World and Sakuliu has been a key figure in advancing this field of practice.
Sakuliu Pavavaljiung (b.1960) was born in the Davaland Village in Sandimen Township
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of Pingtung County, where the Paridrayan (also known as Tjavadran, Dashe or Ravar) clan of
Paiwan people live. Grew up in a family of Pulima (in Paiwan language, Pulima, literally
translated as “the person with many hands,” is the designation for those who excel in various
artisanship including sculpture, embroidery, and dancing), Sakuliu has been dedicated since
the mid-1980s to the revitalization of the lost ancient Paiwan visual and material cultures
through ethnographic and quasi-archaeological investigations in his clan. These early
initiatives developed over the following thirty years, through his holistic socially engaged
practices including from the earlier sculptures, potteries, pedagogies, and public art as well as
architectural projects to the more recent illustration books and installations in contemporary
art museums. Through these practices, the artist has generated a system of visual-textual-
material language-techne that speaks to two entangles worlds. On one side is the Paiwan
societies where Indigenous lifeways that have been previously passed on through only the
waning traditions of oral history and artefacts are now looking for sustainment and rebirth by
seeking publicness in the contemporary art and culture spheres; on the other side is the
mainstream Art World of Taiwan that, though only recently beginning to learn the language of
the Pulima, sees its political and aesthetic efficacies in addressing regional and global
sociocultural and ecological issues today.
Focusing on the critical moments in which the two worlds are brought into dialogue by
Sakuliu since 2009, this chapter examines two types of works of the artist, the illustrative-
narrative and the spatial. In series of drawings collected in publications such as The Dwelling
of Ancestors (2006), Mountain Taros: Indigenous Classroom II (2020), and by Kaohsiung
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Museum of Fine Arts (hereafter KMFA), Sakuliu systematically constructs the narrative
illustrations and texts about plants, artisanship and artefacts, as well as mythologies around
what he calls the “philosophy and ecology knowledge” of Paiwan people. In particular, I will
explore the spatial-temporal structures in his storytelling and how he preserves Paiwan spoken
language’s connections to cosmological beings through careful translations of its key terms
into modern Chinese. Meanwhile, I will also study Sakuliu’s architectural installations at his
three exhibitory projects in “The Dwelling of Ancestors: Ancient Pottery of The Paiwan Tribe
in Taiwan” (National Museum of Natural Science, 2009), “The Great Journey – In Pursuit of
the Ancestral Realm” (KMFA, 2009), “Boundary Narratives” (KMFA, 2015) with an emphasis
on how the artist merges the boundaries between the timeless Indigenous spaces and the
contemporary secular public space of the museum.
Chapter 6: Indigeneity through the politics of ecology: the restoration of homelands and
the recent evolution of contemporary Indigenous art in Taiwan
When Sakuliu invited people from his clan to help with the installation at KMFA in 2009, the
construction team moved directly from a temporal post-disaster settlement site to the
exhibition hall. At the time, the Tjavadran tribe, like many other mountainous Indigenous
tribes in Taiwan, had just lost their homeland to landslides and flooding caused by Typhoon
Morakot. As the governmental surveys conducted in the following years across Taiwan
suggest that most of the original tribal areas in the mountains would remain susceptible to
climate change events, many Indigenous populations were forced to relocate permanently in
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plain areas (Liu 2014). Typhoon Morakot was thus a critical moment after which the
secularization and erosion of the socio-spatial orders, landscape aesthetics, and traditional
lifeways of the Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan have been drastically accelerated. It is not a
coincidence that the disaster is deemed by some Indigenous artists, who have recently begin
to gain attention from the regional and global contemporary art scenes, as the turning point
for their practice. This chapter begins with an investigation of how Typhoon Morakot has
disrupted the Indigenous geospatial orders in Taiwan, with emphasis on the clans of the artists
in focus. Against this background, it explores through the representative works of three artists
how discourses of home lost and return, the rupture and restoration of human-environment
relationships, and eco-cultural as well as Indigenous identities in-transformation have
emerged from and shaped recent contemporary Indigenous art in Taiwan, thus bringing it to a
wider audience.
After losing their homeland to Typhoon Morakot, one elderly member of the Tjavadran
tribe said to Etan Pavavaljung (b. 1963) that “Salulum a vali igaed” (the mountain winds are
fragrant). Inspired by this saying, Etan, another Pulima from the Pavavaljung family, began to
re-imagine Paiwan eco-cosmovisions in his image-making practices through
experimentations with the method of “venecik.” While the noun “venik” in the Paiwan
language denotes patterns seeable in both natural formations and artefacts, the verb “venecik”
encompasses pattern-making actions including writing, etching and embroidering. This
chapter explores how the implement of venecik as a practical method and conceptual
instrument dissolves the demarcation of nature and culture in Etan’s art.
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Aluaiy Kaumakan (b.1971), who comes from an aristocratic family in the Tjavadran
tribe, had years of experience in combining Paiwan artisanship with fashion and jewelry
design before turning to visual arts in the recent ten years. After Typhoon Morakot, she began
to explore “lemikalik” (to entwine) as a technique and a concept in making soft sculptures of
organic forms. This chapter studies her recent works presented in the solo exhibition
“Lemikalik” (Pingtung Majia Taiwan Aboriginal Culture Park, 2020), Taipei Biennial 2020,
and the Yokohama Triennale 2020 to explore the practice of lemikalik as a way of reshaping
the fragmented bodies of Indigenous lands, plants, tribal communities, and women.
Having been a major member of the multi-ethnic Indigenous artist group
“Consciousness Tribe” (c. 意識部落), once active in the Jinzun Beach and Dulan of Eastern
Taiwan, Eleng Luluan (b. 1968) was known for her site-specific, abstract sculptures made of
driftwood during the 2000s. The moment at which her home tribe of Rukai (Drekay in
Indigenous language), which used to be located in Kucapungane Village in Mountain Dawu
of Pingtung County, was destroyed by Typhoon Morakot, marked a watershed in her practice.
Since then, the artist has picked up metals and fabric to make freestanding, symbolic forms
resembling human bodies, plants, and geological formations. Meanwhile, after years of
distancing herself from the Rukai hierarchical social order and rigid artisanship traditions, she
began to renegotiate with her Rukai roots in works such as Between Dreams (2012),
Sharing·Hunter·Mother (2016), Sprawling Hexagonal Weaving (2016), and the “Land
Trauma and The Light and Time of the Kucapungane Community's Ridgeline” series (2019),
through which she explores themes of trauma, loss, mourning, homecoming, nomadic
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destinies of the Indigene, human-environmental relationships, and gender equality. This
chapter will study Eleng’s works after 2010 to unpack these complex conceptual layers.
Chapter 7: Conclusion/Epilogue
The final chapter reflects on what answers to the proposed research questions can be
generated from within-case and cross-case level. Meanwhile, it will summarize new
theoretical concepts, art-critical discourses, and anticipations for the current and future
development in the practicing and theoretical field that emerged during the research process.
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to Media Materialism.” Environmental Humanities 12 (1): 1–22.
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Xie, Lei. 2015. “Political Participation and Environmental Movements in China.” In The
International Handbook of Political Ecology, edited by Raymond L. Bryant, 246–59.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Yeh, Emily T. 2015. “Political Ecology in and of China.” In The International Handbook of
Political Ecology, edited by Raymond L. Bryant, 619–32. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar
Publishing.
Liu, Ts’ui-jung. 2014. “Luelun jinnian lai Taiwan qihou zaihai dui yuanzhumin de chongji yu
zaihou tiaoshi 略論近年來台灣氣候災害對原住民的衝擊與災後調適 [Impacts of Recent
Climate Disasters on Taiwan Aborigines and Their Adjustments].” In Taiwan ji
Taipingyang youbang Nandao Minzu qihou bianqian tiaoshi ji yinying zhengce yantao
wenji 臺灣及太平洋友邦南島民族氣候變遷調適及因應政策研討論文集 [Conference on
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Austronesian Peoples’ Adaptation and Policy Responses to Climate Change in Taiwan

and Pacific Island Nations], edited by 中央研究院環境變遷研究中心, 20–57. Taipei:
Academia Sinica.
Tilt, Brain. The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China: Environmental Values and Civil
Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Weller, Robert. Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and
Taiwan. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Shapiro, Judith. Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary
China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Chen, Yi-fong. 1998. “Indigenous Rights Movements, Land Conflicts, and Cultural Politics
in Taiwan: A Case Study of Li- Shan.” Louisiana State University.
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/6815.
C. Indigeneity
Conceptualizing contemporary indigeneity
Hokowhitu, Brendan, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and

Steve Larkin, eds. 2021. Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies. Oxon:
Routledge.
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. n.d. “Who Are Indigeneous
Peoples.” Website of Indigenous Peoples and Development Branch/Secretariat of the
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, United Nations. Accessed November 26, 2020.
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf
%0Awww.IndigenousPermanetForum.com.
Baird, Ian G. 2020. “Thinking about Indigeneity with Respect to Time and Space: Reflections
from Southeast Asia.” Espace Populations Sociétés [Online].
https://doi.org/10.4000/eps.9628.
Gerharz, Eva, Nasir Uddin, and Pradeep Chakkarath, eds. 2018. Indigeneity on the Move:
Varying Manifestations of a Contested Concept. New York: Berghahn Books. https://doi-
org.ezproxy.cityu.edu.hk/10.2307/j.ctvw04h8f.
Chandler, David, and Julian Reid. 2018. “Being in Being: Contesting the Ontopolitics of
Indigeneity.” The European Legacy 23 (3): 251–68.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2017.1420284.
la Cadena, Marisol de, and Orin Starn, eds. 2017. Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford;
New York: Berg.
Milion, Dian. 2017. “Indigenous Matters.” In Gender: Matter, edited by Stacy Alaimo, 95–
110. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA.
55/65
Teves, Stephanie Nohelani, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja, eds. 2015. Native Studies
Keywords. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
https://julac.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/gfsmci/CUH_IZ51521512460003408
.
Clifford, James. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Merlan, Francesca. 2009. “Indigeneity: Global and Local.” Current Anthropology 50 (3):
303–33. https://doi.org/10.1086/597667.
Indigenous studies in East Asia
Shih, Shu-mei, and Lin chin Tsai, eds. 2021. Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond.
Singapore: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4178-0.
Baird, Ian G. 2019. “Introduction: Indigeneity in ‘Southeast Asia’: Challenging Identities and
Geographies.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 50 (1): 2–6.
Baird, Ian G. 2016. “Indigeneity in Asia: An Emerging but Contested Concept.” Asian
Ethnicity 17 (4): 501–5. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2016.1193804.
Hathaway, Michael J. 2016. “China’s Indigenous Peoples? How Global Environmentalism

Unintentionally Smuggled the Notion of Indigeneity into China.” Humanities 5 (3): 54.
https://doi.org/http://10.3390/h5030054.
Mullaney, Thomas S. 2011. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in
Modern China. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
https://julac.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/gfsmci/TN_cdi_proquest_ebookcentr
al_EBC613131.
McCARTHY, Susan K. 2009. Communist Multiculturalism: Ethnic Revival in Southwest
China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. https://www-jstor-
org.ezproxy.cityu.edu.hk/stable/j.ctvcwn4w3.
Sturgeon, Janet C. 2007. “Pathways of ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ in Yunnan, China.”
Alternatives 32 (1): 129–53.
Gray, Andrew, Robert Harrison Barnes, and Benedict Kingsbury, eds. 1995. Indigenous
Peoples of Asia. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Association for Asian Studies.
Indigenous studies and Ecology
Mickey, Sam, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, eds. 2020. Living Earth Community:
Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing. Cambridge, UK: Open book publishers.
Burkhart, Brian. 2019. Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology
for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures. East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press.
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Monani, Salma, and Joni Adamson, eds. 2017. Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies:
Conversations from Earth to Cosmos. New York: Routledge.
Cadena, Marisol de la. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. 2015. The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual
Worlds. Edited by Translated by Julia Sauma Martin Holbraad Antonia Walford David
Rodgers Iracema Dulley. Chicago: Hau Books.
Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Edited by Translated by Janet Lloyd.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kimmerer, Robin. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge
and the Teachings of Plants. 1st ed. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
https://julac.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/10vp6a/TN_cdi_proquest_ebookcentr
al_EBC1212658.
Grim, John A., ed. 2001. Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology
and Community. Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by Harvard University Press for the
Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School.
Inglis, Julian T, ed. 1993. Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Concepts and Cases. Ottawa:
International Program on Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Canadian Museum of
Nature, and International Research Development Centre.
Johnson, Martha, ed. 1992. LORE: Capturing Traditional Environmental Knowledge. Hay
River: Co-published by Dene Cultural Institute and International Development Research
Centre.
Contemporary Indigenous arts
Küchler, Susanne, and Timothy Carroll. 2021. A Return to the Object: Alfred Gell, Art, and
Social Theory. 2021. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.
Harney, Elizabeth, and Ruth B. Phillips, eds. 2019. Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity,
Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Horton, Jessica L. 2017. Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement
Generation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
McLean, Ian, ed. 2014. Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher.
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cityuhk/detail.action?docID=1859163.
Myers, Fred R. 2002. Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham:
Duke University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv120qtgk.
Gell, Afred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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D. Non-binary ontologies
Vetlesen, Arne Johan. 2019. Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and
the Limits of Posthumanism. Abingdon: Routledge.
Miller, James. 2017. China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Hui, Yuk. 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics.
Falmouth: Urbanomic.
Latour, Bruno, and Translated by Catherine Porter. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of
Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Graham, Harvey, ed. 2014. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. London: Routledge.
Miller, James, Dan Smyer Yu, and Peter van der Veer, eds. 2014. Religion and Ecological
Sustainability in China. 1st ed. London: Routledge.
Callicott, J. Baird, and Roger T. Ames, eds. 1989. Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought:
Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
E. Background surveys
Critical modernity studies and the Anthropocene
Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2015. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across

Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hamilton, Clive, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne, eds. 2015. The Anthropocene
and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in A New Epoch. Routledge
Environmental Humanities. London; New York: Routledge.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Modernity and ecology in and of Greater China
Wang, Hui. 2014. China from Empire to Nation-State. Edited by Translated by Michael
Gibbs Hill. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Kipnis, Andrew B. 2012. “Introduction: Chinese Modernity and the Individual Psyche.” In
Chinese Modernity and the Individual Psyche, edited by Andrew B. Kipnis, 1–16. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
https://doi.org/https://doi-org.ezproxy.cityu.edu.hk/10.1057/9781137268969.
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Wang, Hui. 2009. The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. London;
New York: Verso.
Zielinski, Siegfried, and Silvia Wagnermaier, M., eds. 2008. Variantology 3 – On Deep Time
Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in China and Elsewhere. Cologne: Verlag
der Buchhandlung König.
Chen, Fangming 陳芳明. 2004. Zhimin di mo deng: xiandai xing yu Taiwan shiguan 殖民地摩
登: 現代性與臺灣史觀 [Colonial Modernism: Modernity and the Conception of History
of Taiwan]. Taipei: Mai tian chu ban.
F. Case study materials
Shamanism and disperse religions
Chao, Emily. 2012. Lijiang Stories Shamans, Taxi Drivers, and Runaway Brides in Reform-
Era China. Studies on Ethnic Groups in China. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Nandy, Ashis. 2008. “Shamans, Savages, and the Wilderness 0n the Audibility of Dissent and
the Future of Civilizations.” In Time Treks: The Uncertain Future of Old and New
Despotisms, 173–95. Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Puett, Michael. 2004. To Become A God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, And Self-Divinization In
Early China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Guo, Jing 郭净. 1993. Nuo: qugui, zhuyi, choushen 儺: 驅鬼，逐疫，酬神 [Nuo: Expel
Evil Spirits, Driving Away Plague, Worship Gods]. Hong Kong: San lian shu dian
(Xianggang).
Yang, Ch’ing-k’un. 1991. Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social
Functions of Religion And Some of Their Historical Factors. Prospect Heights, Ill.:
Waveland Press.
Loewe, Michael. 1991. Yuzhou, shenyu yu renlun—Zhongguo gudian xinninan 宇宙·神喻与人
伦——中国古典信念 [Cosmos, Oracle and Morality—Spiritual Traditions in Ancient
China]. Edited by Translated by Guo Jing 郭净. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe.
Chang, Kwang Chih. 1988. Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in
Ancient China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Loewe, Michael. 1982. Chinese Ideas of Life and Death: Faith, Myth and Reason in the Han
Period (202 BC-AD 220). London: Jeorge Allen and Unwin.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Edited by Translated
by Catherine Cullen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, Arthur P., ed. 1974. Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society. Stanford, Calif.: Standford
University Press.
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Waley, Arthur. 1955. The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China. London: G.
Allen and Unwin.
Artistic modernity and contemporary Indigenous art in Taiwan
Huang, Shuping 黃舒屏. 2017. Wei guan feng jing: Yuanzhumin wenhua yu kongjian bushu
危觀風景: 原住民族文化與空間部署 [The Landscape of Crises: Indigenous Cultures
and Spatial Distribution]. Taichung: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
Takamori, Nobuo 高森信男, and Gong Jow jiun 龔卓軍, eds. 2014. Guihun de huifan:
Taiwan dangdai yishu zhong de youling paihuaixue 鬼魂的迴返：台灣當代藝術中的幽
靈徘徊學 [The Return of Ghosts: Hauntology in Taiwanese Contemporary Arts].
Taipei: Chew’s Culture Foundation 財團法人邱再興文教基金會.
Lu, Mei-Fen 盧梅芬. 2007. Tian hai wei liang: Taiwan dangdai Yuanzhumin yishu fazhan 天
還未亮：台灣當代原住民藝術發展 [Before Dawn: The Development of Contemporary
Indigenous Art in Taiwan]. Taipei: Artist Publishing Co.
Jose, Nicholas, and Wen-I Yang, eds. 1995. The Contemporary Art of Taiwan. G+B Arts
International Limited in Association with Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Ethnographic practices in contemporary art
Schneider, Arnd, ed. 2017. Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters.
Bloomsbury Academic.
Schneider, Arnd, and Caterina Pasqualino, eds. 2014. Experimental Film and Anthropology.
London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Fillitz, Thomas. 2014. “Art and Anthropology: Different Practices and Common Fields of
Intersection.” Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, no. 11: 1–13.
http://field-journal.com/issue-11/art-and-anthropology-different-practices-and-common-
fields-of-intersection
Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright, eds. 2005. Contemporary Art and Anthropology.
Oxford; New York: Routledge.
Russell, Catherine. 1999. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video.
Durham: Duke University Press.
G. General research methodologies
Desmond, Matthew. 2014. “Relational Ethnography.” Theory and Society 43 (5): 547–79.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43694733.
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Clarke, Adele. 2005. Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage publications.
Yin, Robert K. 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Third Edit. Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.1300/J145v03n03_07.
Appendix: Eco-art parameters and variables summarized from existing research33
• Representation (Brown 2014), documentation, visualization,

metaphorization, dramatization, and satirization (Weintraub 2012,
xxii–xxiii) of socio-environmental problems
• Research on and investigation of natural processes and ecosystems
(Weintraub 2012, xxii–xxiii; Brown 2014)
• Invocation of natural materials and processes (Brown 2014)
• Connectivity among various aspects of the ecological system

• Collaboration, participation, and engagement-based models of
artmaking
• “Stewardship through inter-relationship” among human and other-
than-human beings to create spaces for co-inhabitation (Kagan 2014,
2 of 6)
Strategies
• Regeneration through nonlinear, regenerative processes that allow for
the automatic generation of outcomes
• Iteration through recurring experimental processes that open
possibilities at every stage
• A balance between “eco-centrism” and “ego-centrism” and between
the communal and the individual
• Interdisciplinarity: garner efforts from various disciplines and

professional as well as local communities
• Bridging everyday life, scientific inquiries, theoretical research, and
utopian envisagement
• “Embodied learning/knowing” through spatialized, deeply bodily,
and perceptual experiences in situated ecological contexts
Conceptual • Drawing on ecological studies oriented towards various theoretical
orientations directions: restoration ecology, social ecology, urban ecology,
industrial ecology, human ecology, ecosystem ecology, deep ecology
(Weintraub 2012, xxxiv–xxxv)
• Challenging the nature-culture dichotomy while distinguishing
“living ecosystems with non-living cybernetic”(Kagan 2014, 4 of 6)
• Differentiating eco-art from the art that addresses the general idea of
posthumanism
• Substituting paradigms of independence with that of inter-
dependence
33
Contents in this table are draw from Kagan, Sacha Jérôme. 2014. “The Practice of Ecological Art.” [Plastik] 4 (April).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274719395_The_practice_of_ecological_art unless other sources are specified.
61/65
• Searching for the “aesthetics of complexity” (Kagan 2014, 3 of 6)

• Environmental and cultural sustainability: practicing “embedded
ecological critique” by practicing environmental ethics in materials,
forms, and contents (Kagan 2014, 1 of 6)
Axiological • Cultural pluralism and biological diversity
convictions • Community commitment: undertaking ethical responsibilities for
human and other-than-human communities
• Political investment: while some artists are involved in radical
political actions and environmental activism, some are less proactive
• Informing, instructing, perturbance, provocation, and activation:
raise public awareness of environmental and ecological crises,
mobilize actions, and motivate behaviour formation (Weintraub
2012, xxiv)
• Preservation, conservation, restoration, and transformation: while
some artists are devoted to “reclaim, restore, and remediate damaged
Socio- environments,” others are less committed to environmental
environmental responsibilities and aim only at “expanding human consciousness”
commitments (Kagan 2014, 1, 3–4 of 6; Weintraub 2012, xxiv)
• Envisagement: proposing strategies of shaping spaces of the co-
inhabitation of humans and other-than-human species
• Intervention: while some artists aim to bring only local changes,
others work on cross-regional or international levels to intervene
“policy, infrastructure, public service or industry entities” (Kagan
2014, 4)
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Thesis Proposal - LIU Mankun July 28

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Qualifying report, LIU Mankun (56057109)

Student Name (Student No.): LIU Mankun (56057109)

Programme: Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Media

Title of Research Proposal:

In Search of Ecocultural Holism: Art, Ecology, and Indigeneity in Greater China

Report Type (Reporting Period):

Qualifying Report (1 Sep 2020 – 06 August 2021)

In Search of Ecocultural Holism: Art, Ecology, and Indigeneity in Greater China

foregrounds politically ecological and Indigenous1 perspectives. In conceptualizing the art

practices in focus as counterstrategies against the modernization enterprise of socio-

critical implications through a collective case study approach.

In the recent five to ten years, a rise of ecological consciousness is evident in

contemporary arts in Mainland China that engage with socio-environmental critiques,

multispecies relationships, and environmental activism (Yang 2019).2 In Taiwan, a similar

Western and non-modern worldviews grounded in the constantly transforming Indigenous

moving images works, multi-media installations, and ethnographical eco-documentaries that

trace the contemporary presence of various animist cosmovisions in economically and

with visual representations of socio-environmental degradations in everyday reality, thus

continuously lost to State-driven land expropriations, capitalist economic development, and

of Taiwan and Austronesia since the early 2010s.

To fully address the art-historical, ecocultural, and sociopolitical implications of the

above practices, this research contextualizes their emergence in a long-term process of

undergirding developmentalist ideology (Wang 2009, 95–98), marches continuously from

monistic eco-cosmovisions with Western modernist dualist worldviews. This ideological

spiritual loss, multi-scalar ecological crises, and human-environmental alienation keep

afflicting marginalized communities whose livelihoods remain inextricable from their

increasingly fragile relationships to local ecosystems.

native ecological consciousness in today’s art in Greater China as critiques of and

counterstrategies against the modernist project of imperial, as well as internal, colonization of

marginalized human and other-than-human worlds. Specifically, it intends to answer several

On the with-case level

• What eco-cosmovisions, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (hereafter TEK), Indigenous

contemporary art and media landscapes through the practices in focus?

• How are the original socio-communal functions of these traditions transformed or

conceptualization, production, display, circulation, and articulation?

politics take place?

On the cross-case level

in Greater China with respect to its visual-textual languages, narrative perspectives,

methodologies of practices,7 and aesthetical as well ethical dispositions?

• What new conceptualization of ecological media and Indigenous media may an

identification of the above characteristics generate?

essentially anthropocentric establishments of European and North American modern and

offered by interdisciplinary political ecology, ecocultural identity politics,8 and

in Anglophone contexts. In addition, it intends to make a modest contribution to the

establishment of ecological and East Asian post-colonial critiques as an intervention in extant

the hegemonic modernist enterprise.

The following sections of this proposal present a brief review of literature, an

bibliography of key texts relevant to this project.

builds up a criterial-relational framework for conceptualizing indigeneity in the contemporary

of indigeneity and discusses the regional particularities of indigeneity in Greater China.

Broad issues raised by canonical Anglophone studies of ecological art

“investigate the interconnected environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relationships

prominent in the 1990s in response to artistic practices that distinctively differentiated

themselves from the historical categories of Earthwork and environmental art by

incorporating strategies of sustainability, biodiversity, interdependence, environmental

engineering (Kagan 2013, 271–73).

range of meanings that include, non-exhaustively, “environment, relationships between

organism and environment, thinking, and being as interconnections, coexistence and

thus exposed to infinite possibilities. Meanwhile, while previous scholarly publications,

transregional discussions of art and ecology.

Correspondingly, recent studies in the field have demonstrated more interdisciplinary

taxonomical method largely focusing on the supposedly universal classification of eco-art