Devising Our Own Demise
Unlike many of our counterparts in the animal kingdom, man possesses an astounding ability to adapt to a variety of ecosystems, many of which threaten him with drought, malnutrition, high altitude, humidity, scarcity of food and disease. But man is not merely a victim of his habitat — he also inflicts radical changes upon the natural environment, including one of our biggest threats as a species: climate change, which has led to hurricanes, droughts, and coral bleaching.1 Huge sections of the rainforest are burned every day, causing erosion and the loss of species. Poor farming techniques have led to desertificationand degradation of soil. Sadly our intelligence as a species has a tendency to blown up in our faces. One such example is the case of the “colony collapse disorder,” whereby the European honeybees used to pollinate commercial crops have died out by much as 50% in some places, due to the overuse of neonicotinoid pesticides. Ironically then, the very pesticides originally used to guarantee the farmer a greater profit margin have now led to him being forced to pay up to 20% of his earnings to rent other bees for pollination.
But the phenomenon of agricultural practices impacting our ecosystems is nothing new. Indeed, it’s been going on since the advent of plant breeding over 10,000 years ago, when man began to select certain seeds for replanting and cultivation. This weeding out of certain undesirable characteristics had its advantages, but ultimately limited the earth’s biodiversity. During the agricultural green revolution of the 1940s-60s, huge leaps in productivity were made when farmers decided to plant a single crop across vast acreages. This, in turn, meant that high levels of pesticides were required to prevent against disease. In forestry, this practice of monoculture meant easier harvesting of timber but resulted in clear cutting, soil erosion, and species loss.
Savinder Bual’s work “Folis Arboreus” — a play on Latin plant names which actually means “Bellows Trees” — explores this phenomenon through a video which depicts black and white drawings of plants and trees multiplying and receding into the background before slowly re-approaching the foreground. Bual achieved this effect by placing the drawings within the folds of a concertina and moving the bellows back and forth to create the illusion of movement. These animated species appear almost threatening, crowding in on us and bringing to life the idea that the ecosystem is something with a mind of its own, something to be feared and ultimately respected.
Thus while other species merely try to survive, man‘s quest for profit and success has fundamentally altered his environment. We have transformed ourselves from a mainly agrarian society, organized around family and village networks, into a dispersed group of economic migrants, living in large anonymous urban settings and consuming mass-produced food.
Magdalen Wong addresses this change in her installation work “Duets: Hong Kong Diets” which turns the contents of packages of Vitasoy Malt and Doll Shrimp Hargao dumplings into musical scores with male and female voices reading the contents of the package in rising and falling pitches. Almost robotic voices list off ingredients such as “Water, Soya Bean Extract, Milk Solids, Soya Bean Oil, Sodium Bicarbonate, Salt, Vitamins, (Niacinamide, Calcium-Pantothenate, A, B6, B1, and B2)” falling slowly as if in some sort of chant. There is something inhuman and mechanical about the way these products’ names are recited as if the adage “you are what you eat” has resulted in the human becoming machine due to the over-ingestion of processed foods. In the case of the dumplings, the melody skips about in a more atonal fashion, as if the notes have been scattered pell-mell across the score.
The work consists of MP3 recordings, photos of the exterior of the packaging and images of musical scores that mimic the design of the packaging. Whereas in pre-industrial times we would have been forced to procure dumplings from the local neighborhood dumpling stand, or even make them ourselves, now we buy plastic packaged frozen products and place them in a microwave for a few seconds before consuming them, most likely with part of the dumpling burning hot, and part of it still frozen.
Wong sees these products a fundamental part of her Hong Kong childhood. Going to the 7-11 for a snack, purchasing a dumpling and then popping it in the in-store microwave was part of the rhythm of Hong Kong’s fast food culture. While in the past our culinary soundscape was punctuated by the chop, chop, chop of a cleaver, the sizzle and pop of oil in a wok, or the call of a hawker in the streets, today we content ourselves with the beep, beep, beep of a microwave or the low hum of the refrigerator keeping all our pre-packaged and heavily processed foods cool and seemingly fresh.
Chen Hangfeng also explores the opposing rhythms of traditional and contemporary life in his multi-channel video work “Scattered Scenes Along Mei Creek.” The installation depicts the daily activities of a small town near Wenzhou, which produces 50% of the world’s Christmas decorations. Chen has visited the village a number of times, and on one occasion discovered a clan book which contained several poems about the scenery of the town, which used to be named Mei Creek but has since changed its name. The village was once home to a number of important artist-scholar poets and Chen sought to trace the history of the town with documentary footage alluding to this illustrious pre-industrial past, his use of muted tones suggestive of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Scenes of family workshops filled with baskets of unfinished ornaments are juxtaposed with the winding form of the creek, studded with clusters of red glittering Christmas ornaments. Scenes of jiggling palettes of red hearts and giant buckets of glitter are paired with images of the village wet market and a soundtrack of workers talking while listening to traditional opera in their local dialect. One thing that struck Chen while filming the piece was how workers adapted traditional farm tools such as rakes, grain sifting baskets and bamboo cutters to factory applications — as if they were cultivating a crop of strange sparkling objects. The work manages to capture the sheer absurdity of the situation — farmers in Jiangsu re-employed as factory workers to make decorations for a holiday they do not even celebrate, let alone understand. In the video, there are certain shots that allude to the lost charm of Mei Creek, but it becomes clear that its natural beauty has been invaded by discarded bits of garland, broken shards of mirror, or a faded flocked deer stripped of its fur and floating upside down in a pool.
This juxtaposition of rural and industrial landscapes is especially pronounced in China, where a rural enterprise scheme led to factories being opened all over the countryside in an attempt to prevent urban migration. Chen Xi alludes to this phenomenon in “Plowing and Sowing and Watering Machine.” A machine of the artist’s own invention, this creation looks like a steam tractor, plowing furrows into the earth, sowing seeds and producing a plume of vapor to water any surrounding plants. Chen’s work reminds us of exactly how unfriendly our farming techniques really are: of how we exhaust our soil, use petrochemical resources in excess, and fill our rivers full of algae-forming nitrogen.
“Robot Behind Tree Which is Behind Rectangle with Round Corners” takes this issue into more abstract territory. In this piece, a prosaic cluster of trees is framed by a hovering aestheticized rectangle. The shape appears almost like a coveted designer object, at once framing and blocking the trees — the wild chaos of their branches is contrasted with its static, controlled lines. This image points to man’s need to tame the wild, to produce beautiful products that make our lives more convenient, no matter what costs must be incurred by the planet for us to do so.
The robot hulking behind the trees represents our ongoing fears about the direction that technology may or may not be headed in. The debate that began with the Luddites in the first Industrial Revolution (“have we created a monster?”) has reared its head again in the digital age. Isaac Asimov is probably best known for addressing the role which robots should play in our society in his 1942 short story “I, Robot,” in which he laid out the parameters that must be programmed into robots at their inception to prevent them from participating in violent behavior. “I, Robot,” however, is only one of many works of popular culture to problematize the role of the robot in society — other examples include “Blade Runner,” “Terminator” and “AI.” Though classic science fiction has, in an uncanny fashion, foretold much of the scientific progress we are seeing now (there are now robots which can eat biomass as fuel, shoot attackers and even babysit), we tend to lack the moral tools to deal with the various ethical questions surrounding such advances. For instance, it was ten years after genetic screening was available in the US that legislation was finally passed to protect citizens from discrimination. 2
The issue of policy lagging behind the technology is something Francesca Galeazzi examines in her work “Justifying Bad Behaviour,” made in cooperation with Cape Farewell — a UK based climate change organization. Galeazzi’s performance involved purchasing a canister of CO2 and releasing it at the idyllic Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland. Galeazzi had bought some insurance for her shocking action, a carbon offset for one ton of carbon, valued at 24 Euros, making her action carbon neutral. But it is only in seeing the CO2 make a violent exit from the canister do we truly realize the impact we are having on our surroundings.
Though some may argue that her actions are reckless, the truth is that Americans consume 19 tons of carbon a year, (compared to Galeazzi’s mere 6kg) and all for the noble purposes of business meetings and sunny vacations. The artist herself is, in fact, no casual commentator; Working as an architect and campaigner for the implementation of green building technology, she plays quite an active role in this debate.
Certainly, the need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels is something we are reminded of every time we step outside and take a deep breath. Li Xiaofei has long been fascinated with the underbelly of resource extraction and in “Assembly Line No. 11” he takes us into the dark and sooty world of a coal honeycomb briquette factory, where shirtless workers wearing flimsy cotton shorts shuffle back and forth between an assembly line hauling stacks of briquettes. The scene — dark and lit in chiaroscuro — looks like a scene out of the industrial revolution, characterized by an image of molten metal spilling out of a pile of slag like blood out of a wound. As with many of Li’s works, there is a contrast between a visual orderliness, the mounds of identically-shaped, perfectly-stacked coal and a kind of seeping sense of malaise represented in the oozing slag — like the slow accumulation of some intractable problem. While they are cheap and readily available, these coal briquettes are frequently made with dirty coal. This is unfortunate, as they are often used for residential cooking and heating despite being associated with cancer and respiratory problems. Still, for people on the margins of poverty, cancer can often seem like an abstract problem.
Zhen Wenxin presents a similarly dystopic picture of the future in her painting series “Black Cave” which depicts a number of people in bleak urban landscapes being oppressed and tortured by machines. One figure is getting blasted by smoke (his body curled up as if he has been hit by a water cannon), another is grasped by a pincer on the end of a crane, while a third is flattened by an airplane wheel. One of the most interesting works features a person lying prone on an operating table hooked up to two machines. It’s hard to tell whether these machines are of the benevolent kind, or the kind that seeks to enact some kind of zombie mind control. What is clear is that the humans are enslaved by the very machines they’ve created.
Zheng’s second series looks more at the growth of the species as a whole, the sheer number of people whose demands for resources have put us where we are now. Her work features images of humans streaming across the street, their forms depicted more as shadows or vague entities than concrete figures. It’s the kind of scene one would find in any large metropolis — commuters going on their way, thinking about the minutiae of their lives, what they will have for dinner, a small disagreement with a colleague. Sadly it’s this self-interested nature of the human psyche that makes any kind of serious environmental progress impossible.
This image of multitudes is reiterated in “Ironing Oceans” by Bovey Lee, a paper cut work depicting rows and rows of women dressed in factory smocks, ironing out the ripples in the surface of the ocean. In the foreground, a woman in a button-up shirt with a dead expression looks squarely at the viewer. The juxtaposition between foreground and background highlights the lives of those hired to manufacture the products we so desperately crave as consumers. There is a Sisyphean nature to this work — once a wave is ironed, it will be quickly be replaced by another. But beyond the human toll of such repetitive labor in less than optimal conditions, there is also another layer of meaning to this work. As a means of counteracting global warming, scientists have suggested the idea of seeding oceans with iron, in order to stimulate phytoplankton growth. This, in theory, would help consume the excess CO2 we produce and create cloud formation at the poles to deflect solar energy. But our understanding of the ecosystem is hopelessly imperfect. Critics of the scheme argue that the increased levels of plankton will produce other kinds of greenhouse gases, altering the ecosystem and point out the risk that tainted iron could release heavy metals into the ocean.
Lee’s work powerfully encapsulates some of the themes explored in the show: how scientific solutions can engender new problems, how the drive to consume creates not only a change in the structure of society but also a drain on natural resources and how the factory can be read as a kind of machine in itself that forces humans into a subservient role. Perhaps the uncomfortable fact is that our current approaches to problem-solving (i.e., the idea that science will ultimately save the day) and our overarching attitudes towards economic policy (that is, growth over sustainability) are antithetical to our survival as a species.
1, Ramsay, Arthur Don, “Man and His Environment,” (The President, Xth Internation Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences), Concept Publishing Company: New Delhi, 1980, (introduction)
2, Lin Patrick, Keith Abney, and Georg A. Berkey, Eds. “Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics,” MIT: Cambridge USA, 2012.
