15:00-15:10  Introduction by Moderator

15:10-15:55  Antje Majewski: Of Trees and People

15:55-16:25  Xu Tan: Mother Earth and Diet

16:25-16:35  Intermission

16:35-16:55  Huang Po-Chih: If Dreams were Plants

16:55-17:30  Lo Lai Lai Natalie: From Nature towards a Field of Unknown

17:30-17:45  Open Discussion

17:45-18:00  Q&A

Antje Majewski (Artist)

Antje Majewski (b. 1968, Marl, Germany) is an artist and curator. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Himmelpfort. From 2006 to 2011 she taught at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and has been a professor of painting at Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel since 2011.

Antje Majewski’s practice is based largely on anthropological and philosophical research, with her figurative painting, photography and video work exploring the social roles that objects play. Following years of intensively tracing the histories of seven objects in an investigation that took her across continents and yielded both paintings and video works (“The World of Gimel,” Kunsthaus Graz, 2011), she shifted her focus to biodiversity and its interface with both historical and modern apple varieties. Her exhibition project “Apple. An Introduction. (Over and Over again)” comprises paintings, objects and a documentary film that bring the complex relationship between the global food industry and technological progress to the forefront.

Often acting as an intermediary for collaborative thought, Majewski gives ecology an aesthetic and social dimension while also lending it a sense of time, place and pertinence. For a period of three years, Majewski was a member of feminist group ff. She then went on to found E.F.A. (Eco-Feminist Anarchism). In her series “E.F.A. im Garten,” she documented nature’s reclamation of a community garden in Berlin that was cleared by investors, framing this restoration as an act of anarchistic freedom. In 2018, Majewski’s interdisciplinary, collaborative exhibition project entitled “How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions” opened at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She invited artists from Brazil, China, France, Colombia, Cameroon, Poland, Senegal, and Hungary to contribute works to this exhibition that poetically explored the reciprocal relationships between humans and other lifeforms.

Majewski’s work also investigates objects transported from their places of origin and separated from their contexts for exhibition abroad—a practice that has become increasingly common since the beginning of European colonialism of Africa. She investigated this concept further in group exhibitions on the concept of art and craft at Gropius Bau Berlin and Kunsthaus Graz (2019), probing the transformation of meaning, function and value that cultural objects undergo upon being archived, conserved, and exhibited.

Xu Tan (Artist)

Xu Tan (b. 1957, Wuhan) currently lives in the Pearl River Delta region and the United Sates. He was a member of the “Big Tail Elephant Working Group,” an early experimental artistic collective in China. Xu Tan maintains a “wandering” way of life, sensitive to changes in social and cultural lives, and constantly in pursuits of the limits of contemporary art. His research-based methods explore possibilities of how to unite social research and artistic practice in order to carry out social knowledge production. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions including at the 53rd and 50th Venice Biennales (2003, 2009), the Berlin Biennale (2001), the Guangzhou Triennial (2002) and the Gwangju Biennale (2002), amongst others.

Lo Lai Lai Natalie (Artist)

Lo Lai Lai Natalie was born in 1983 in Hong Kong. She graduated from the Faculty of Art in The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Major in Fine Arts, Minor in Japanese Studies) in 2006. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017. Lai Lai is a former travel journalist. She is interested in the development and the construction of nature. She is a learner at the collective organic farm Sangwoodgoon (Hong Kong) where she also explores the lifestyle of “Half-Farming, Half-X”, a practice that seeks alternatives and autonomy as an artist and Hong-Konger. Lai Lai founded the Slow-so TV channel, with a focus on food, farming, fermentation, slow-driving, surveillance, and meditation. Her artworks are mostly moving images, photography, mixed media and installation. (Located in Tse Uk Tsuen, Kam Sheung Road, Sangwoodgoon is a laboratory aiming at exploring and practicing values of new life. It is currently a perma-farming production base. Sangwoodgoon organizes Sangwoodgoon Food and Farming Film Festival, presents screenings of agriculture and food documentaries from around the world, and encourages discussions on related topics.)

Po-Chih Huang (Artist)

Po-Chih Huang graduated from the Taipei National University of the Arts with a Master’s degree from the Department of New Media Art, School of Film and New Media. His diverse artistic practice revolves around the circumstances and history of his family, which enables him to investigate issues including agriculture, manufacturing, production, consumption, and more. Since 2013, exhibitions of his continuous art project “Five Hundred Lemon Trees” have been transformed into a crowd-funding platform allowing the appropriation of artistic resources for developing an agricultural brand, activating fallow farmland, and growing lemon trees for lemon liquor. Simultaneously, the project has connected his family members, local farmers, and consumers to make new social relationships possible. In 2013 he also published his first collection of essays, Blue Skin–All About My Mother, an account of the personal history of his mother’s life, which reflects Taiwan’s agriculture economic reform and social change over the past fifty years. Through micro-level observations of his own family history, the work evokes society in Taiwan as a whole.

Yan Fang (Curator of Public Programs, UCCA)

Yan Fang is an art critic and curator of public programs at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. She graduated from University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne with a Master’s degree in History of Art: History of Art and Philosophy, and has previously worked at the Musée national d’Art moderne/Centre Pompidou.