A CROSS-CULTURAL VISUAL DIALOGUE ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Opening + Panel Discussion: September 11th | 6pm

Trace Evidence is a media exhibition at Minnesota Street Project in which visual artists Zhou Tao​, Mo Kong​, and Connie Zheng​ present works considering issues of environmental change focused on China. Trace Evidence will take place in affiliation with the Global Climate Action Summit and in partnership with SFMOMA Public Dialogue. 

Americans look across to China and see the physical conditions produced by late capitalism, magnified because of the scale and speed of development. China’s industrialization and urbanization have degraded its environment in a similar but more accelerated manner than that taking place in the U.S. Trace Evidence brings together the work of three visual artists born in China whose work creates a unique space for conversation about climate change. These artists conceive of climate change as a hyperobject - a term coined by Timothy Morton - for something that can never be seen in its entirety, yet affects everything. According to Rob Nixon, climate change is a form of slow violence that harms and displaces people, but at a slower speed than that at which violence usually occurs, forcing us to rethink timescales. How are artists taking the visual elements of climate change, pollution, and extraction and making them accessible? How does art make something imperceptible into something sensible?

Zhou Tao is an internationally acclaimed artist most known for his stunning video work. Addressing pressing issues of our time, his work articulates the border between the natural and the human-made through acute attention to the details of space. The Worldly Cave [Fán Dòng] depicts Hakka communities in natural and industrial landscapes around the globe. With no narrative arc, each scene is arranged through form-light, color, and especially eerie shades of purple. The viewer becomes witness to places surreal in their distinct combination of familiarity and strangeness. One perceives what might be a sunset, followed by an unlikely series of objects - animals, industrial machinery, ruins of structures. The people, it seems, are there for scale, wandering around muddy landscapes with headlamps in the ordinary dress of southern Chinese. We are unsettled but unharmed; the images are beautiful and yet we know we should not find them so. We don’t know where we are because we could be anywhere on earth, or not on earth.

Mo Kong explores China’s industrialization, globalization, and censorship. Many of Mo Kong’s works involve a hole, representing the break between the spatial and the non-spatial, to investigate the effects of these processes on the psyche. See Sun, and Think The Shadow shows the disastrous impacts of China’s mining industry through a collage of images. Mo Kong’s work is in part a critique of extraction of the earth’s resources; likewise he does to the Internet what we see in this critique- an extensive grab. Distorted photographic images background close-ups on the interior of a mouth receiving dental work - more extractive pain. Ghost and prayer-hand emojis seem random but are not; they give us clues about our affective responses. We hear American country music describing a mining town, Beyonce’s “Sweet Dreams,” and the artists’ voice, somewhat noncommittally drifting in and out of the piece. “The distance between me and my family... me and the earth’s core, mother fucking mother fuck mother…” the artist says. It is an obvious rupture - the failure to cohere. The hole symbol persists, but what we really see in these sinkholes and other disasters is falling. “Why are you so obsessed with holes? No I’m not. I’m just. Afraid,” he continues. The piece is a horror to behold, and yet is satisfying in the work it does to make destruction talkable.

Connie Zheng treats drawings and texts as proposals for interdisciplinary inquiries in an effort to examine the dredges of history via a bricolage of materials and signifiers. A certain kind of fluorescence links concerns around cultural and environmental colonization, as well as the relationship between ecology and U.S. imperial concerns. In this film, Zheng uses her subject position as a Chinese-American to examine and interrogate a U.S. media-mediated reading of Chinese “toxicity” and pollution, while also observing the migration of the media image, linkages between environment and body, and the troubled boundaries between interior and exterior spaces.

Curated by Annie Malcolm and Rachelle Reichert.