Plant Time 植物时间
Co-curated with Sirui Zhang
Exhibition Venue: 69Campus, Baideli Auto Park, 143 North Xisihuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing
September 04 - December 04, 2021
In recent years, especially amid a global pandemic and frequently occurring extreme weather, the notion of "plant turn" seems to be sweeping the intellectual and creative world.[1]. Plants, covering more than 80% of the earth's surface, convert solar energy into electrical potential energy through photosynthesis. In turn, it drives a series of biochemical reactions, including turning carbon dioxide and water into carbon-containing energy carriers and oxygen, giving carbon-based organisms access to energy and carbon matter, and sustaining their evolution on this planet. From the perspective of a broad ecosystem, plant growth directly impacts the planet's climate change, and observations on micro-ecologies show that plants are closely integrated with surrounding living organisms. Their intricate roots extend continuously underground, forming a comprehensive system by breathing, sensing, growing, and reproducing together. Plants have memories and can communicate with each other, creating symbiotic relationships among them in unique ways; from a non-human-centric perspective, the transformation of humans by plants is perhaps much more substantial than what we imagine of the reverse. As historian Yuval Noah Harari writes, "If we look at the agricultural revolution from the point of view of wheat, 10,000 years ago, wheat was just one of many types of wild grasses, confined to a small patch in the Middle East. But within a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth."[2] Inevitably, the key to human prosperity and survival still lies in plants.
These perceptions of plants are gradually becoming new common knowledge from a non-anthropocentric perspective. As botanists and geneticists slowly lose their exclusive authority on plant life, anthropologists, philosophers, and artists dedicate more efforts to de-instrumentalize the observation and study of plants and consider their relational and non-hierarchical paradigms as new ethical and political models. In Mushroom at the End of the World, the author Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing looks at the collection and circulation of matsutake mushrooms. Because this mushroom species cannot be artificially cultivated but provide nutrients to the trees, they coexist and depend on one another. The matsutake mushroom, a native plant of Japan, is associated with the formation of habitats after deforestation. The intermingled relationship between matsutake mushrooms, pine trees, humans, and related species in circulation unfolds a dynamic ecological vision of intertwined and overlapping habitats where multiple species coexist. Regarding plant intelligence, since the publication of the controversial Secret Life of Plants in the 1970s (which argues that plants can read human minds) to the What a Plant Knows released in 2013 by American plant geneticist Daniel Chamowitz (which explores how plants' acute perceptions help them understand the world), research on this subject continued uninterruptedly. “Plant neurobiology,” first proposed in 2006, raised many questions and skepticism, was considered radical neurological research at the time. Today, "plant neurobiology" is attracting more attention to questions such as do plants have neurons? How do they perceive? How do they move? Although most scientists still refute the idea that plants are intelligent compared to the so-called higher animals, it is becoming a new perception that plants are complex, senses-driven, and conscious creatures. The de-instrumentalized and de-anthropomorphized, or in short, the de-anthropocentric perspective to observe plants and carry out research, is nearly an arduous and long-term project.
The exhibition proposes "Plant Time," aimed to initiate inspiring discussions revolving around plant sensibility, plant intelligence, and learning from plants, to reconsider the complexity of nature in the current moment - a new natural form consists of organic and inorganic matters, and what humans can create and reflect on in this unique natural condition. The setbacks of the human body size and curing social habits, including behavioral patterns and attention spans, prevent humans from noticing the slow movements of plants and their responses to stimuli. Furthermore, the short lives of humans do not allow them to witness the growth of plants that can last hundreds or even thousands of years; most perennial plants do not have an actual life expectancy, nor do they have a "maturation period " and "senescence." Time is a measuring unit applicable to both plants and human society. From the human perspective, plant life is almost a cyclical and perpetual life-form. For example, a large banyan tree can live without unforeseen natural catastrophes or human destruction for thousands of years. From the plant perspective, human activities on earth are comparable to a drop of water in the ocean. We are accustomed to a singular and linear temporal logic, with a sequence of events unfold in cause and effect. This notion constrains our ability to shape and imagine a time, while today's digital world has opened up humans' "network time" dimension. Here, "Plant Time" attempts to propose another dimension to observe time by looking at the structure of plants. The meristematic tissues of plants can differentiate into various types of cells at any time, and they can grow continuously as long as sunlight, air, and water in the environment meet their growth needs. For these reasons, plants exist more as a collective than as individuals, and within this collective, there are time differences within individual plant. It’s apparent that, by understanding and learning about the collective intelligence of plant life, we can better help humans address the blind spots in ecological issues and imagine a kind of time for post-human life, thereon, to transcend it. Observing plant time is also a way to discover the significance of plants in an urban environment. The city is a space developed from human civilization that divides nature and culture. In the process of expanding urbanization, mother nature is gradually absorbed as part of the urban infrastructure. At present, nature has become a spectacle to fulfill human demand and planning, and in the new nature-infrastructure system, plants often serve as urban landscaping and green belts. With this exhibition, we would also like to rethink future interactions between greeneries and urban infrastructure through works of art.
[1] Drawing from the "animal turn" proposed and furthering the development of ecological research, some researchers who initially focused only on the relationship between human beings and the natural environmental ecology have gradually turned their attention to the animals living with human beings on the earth. Scholars such as, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe, and others have addressed this subject.
[2] Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (pp. 80-81). Harper Collins. Kindle Edition.