Zheng Bo: How to Live on Planet Earth | Ocula Conversation

Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo's social, ecological, and community-engaged art practice has, in recent years, focused on moving beyond a human-centred perspective to an all-inclusive, multi-species approach. He takes up marginalised plants and communities of people as subjects in his large-scale interventions, which reintroduce wildness into institutional and abandoned spaces. Plants Living in Shanghai (2013), for example, was an intervention Zheng realised at an abandoned Shanghai cement factory as part of the 2013 West Bund Architecture and Contemporary Art Biennale, for which he preserved the site for a period of time before its intended transformation into a bustling public plaza. Zheng introduced more local plant species to the site, turning it into a community botanical garden, and to further contextualise the project, collaborated with local scholars specialised in ecology, literature, Chinese medicine, and architecture to organise an eight-week online course on MOOC with on-si

Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo's social, ecological, and community-engaged art practice has, in recent years, focused on moving beyond a human-centred perspective to an all-inclusive, multi-species approach. He takes up marginalised plants and communities of people as subjects in his large-scale interventions, which reintroduce wildness into institutional and abandoned spaces. Plants Living in Shanghai (2013), for example, was an intervention Zheng realised at an abandoned Shanghai cement factory as part of the 2013 West Bund Architecture and Contemporary Art Biennale, for which he preserved