展览预告 | 2026“永续之籽”主题展览“向地练习：在根系、水流与风暴之间”

Things get complicated when we try to describe a place. No ‘place’ is essentially static or immutable. Rivers, power grids and cultivated land are woven into one another. Different geological times overlap. Landscapes are continuously being made. Humans and more-than-human beings are constantly making and remaking one another. What is a place? How do we respond to the urge and the responsibility to tell a place’s story?

In 2025, the second edition of the ‘Seeds Project: Education Programs for a Sustainable Future’ launched ‘Island of Coexistence’, an initiative of exchange, collective learning and creative support focusing on shareable experiences of place. In this context, what does it mean to experience a place? Is it an aspiration, a prompt, or a method? Following a week-long collective-learning workshop and fieldwork in October 2025, the participants resubmitted their proposals and began developing their works. My role as curator of the 2026 feature exhibition was primarily to work with the participants as their proposals evolved, to support the production of their works, and to help the exhibition take shape. I noticed that while some works centred on research and knowledge production, others began from lived realities that felt personally connected to them. ‘Experiences of place’ might be just one strand drawn from a longer-term practice, or it might become central to a work’s discourse and form. The artists also investigated how to ‘name’ and ‘look’ — what kinds of relations, temporalities, movements and scales make this place what it is?

It was through this process that the exhibition’s theme emerged — ‘Roots, Currents and Storms: Rehearsing a Language to Come’. We sought to move away from abstract ecological concerns, sweeping environmental narratives and established accounts of local knowledge. Instead, we attempted to ground the work in lived experience where bodies, materials and actions meet. Perhaps the most powerful thing about these works is not how they represent a place, but how the artists situate themselves within it — what ways of looking and what paths of encounter allow them to meet the world, exchange with it, and be changed in the process? ‘My’ sense of responsibility arises not only from ‘my’ own connection to ‘this place’, but also from recognising that ‘this place’ is already implicated in countless relationships extending beyond itself.

Some practices return to the site again and again. Over the course of two years, Wu Zechun walked, observed and recorded along the Huxi River in Chongqing, examining it through scientific mapping and research into social change. His Touch the River, Touch Life emerged from this process, comprising moving image, installation, pictorial works, self-published books, and participatory art workshops. Electrical System, Cleanliness, and Urban Tower-Base Cultivation grew out of Lei Yunbing’s observations of cultivated land beneath high-voltage transmission towers in Chongqing’s University Town. How is land used, occupied and divided? How do people adapt and transform their farming environments? What role does infrastructure play in the process? Lei uses moving image and 3D-printed sculpture to unpack the entangled relations. Xie Ruichi and Bao Shuangwen’s film New Mountain delves into the wild vegetables in Nanjing’s Yeshan Mountain and its natural habitats. The camera moves through the mine’s layered temporalities, from the 1950s to the present, eventually arriving at the fault surface exposed by decades of mining. The gathering, trading and consumption of these plants, in turn, give rise to a new landscape. The Wandering of Plants zooms in on the roof slab of the University Town South underground station, a peculiar spot on Xiaoguwei island in Guangzhou. Surrounded by universities and residential areas, the site has been deserted for years with fences outside and plants growing wild inside, while the ebb and flow of passing crowds take no interest in this patch of ‘wasteland’. Drawing on their backgrounds in landscape and architecture, Liu Hengye, Zhang Xin and Ma Guihui carried out a sampling survey and developed a board game and a series of interactive installations that invite audiences into this complex and diverse local ecology. In these practices, ‘place’ is not an object waiting to be depicted. It is a relational site that takes shape through repeated walking, mapping, labour and continual adjusting distances.

Some works begin with what cannot be reached directly. In Finding Home: Birds’ Home, Suhyun Roh noticed that urban buildings are often fitted with anti-bird spikes that birds repurpose as nesting material. The artist works with discarded urban materials, such as wire, wood and bird spikes, and builds on her observations and records of birds and urban development, to create an uncertain space of installation. In what ways are we ‘permitted’ to exist in the city, and how might we find ourselves cast out at any moment? The Sea-Crossing Project: Still Taste the Salty is an attempt to trace, and reckon with, a life that remains out of reach. Chan Jiatong’s ‘grandmother whom she never met’ is nevertheless present throughout her life. Over the course of more than a year of ‘sea-crossing’, Chan drifted along waterways by ferry, on foot and by electric scooter, passing through more than ten ferry crossings. Her work is a mix of bodily performance, participatory co-creation and environmental installation, unfolding its narrative through semi-fictional moving image. Together, these works ask: can we understand a bird? How do we imagine other forms of life? We cannot truly become another being, yet we keep approaching what we cannot fully know. We cannot fully inhabit histories in which we were not present, yet we continue to embrace and connect with the world through material and bodily experience.

Some works suggest that the very ways in which we approach an object also shape how it comes into view. Flesh of the Soil develops its place-based research through oral accounts from inshore aquaculture farmers, family experiences of aquaculture and episodes of environmental disaster in Dalian. Through a lecture-performance, Gai Qizheng and Sun Fanxi explore how technology, efficiency and capital forcefully reduce the sea cucumber to a commodity assigned a precise value on the industrial production line. In Lyu Yijie’s moving image work Clouds Never Disperse, ‘cloud’ becomes a medium shaped by both the natural environment and mechanism of human perception. The film reimagines the expeditions undertaken by the American botanist Joseph F. Rock after his arrival in Yunnan in 1922 through the imagined perspective of a Naxi member of the expedition. In doing so, it unpacks the camera’s role in ‘making clouds’ — not only bringing Yunnan into view, but also producing layers of technological and epistemic mist — and examines the entanglement of images with ecological, political and other forces. In Dong Yingyao and Fan Xiang’s piece, the focal medium is glass, a material used in urban life to keep nature at a distance. After the Typhoon Passed attends not only to the physical transformations that typhoons bring about in living beings and built environments, but also to the everyday habits people gradually develop in response to disaster as well as to the different positions from which typhoons are observed. In these works, sea cucumbers, clouds, wasteland plants and traces left by typhoons cease to be passive objects before the gaze. Instead, they draw technology, capital, urban planning, disaster and bodily experience into relation, compelling viewers to reconsider the scale, media and position from which they encounter the world.

In other works, ‘place’ is folded and carried beyond its original geography. Fabric functions as a multi-layer medium in Lai Lili’s Fragments of Flowers. The floral fabric fluttering in the wind evokes the artist’s childhood memories, while offcuts from the textile supply chain at Xiaogang Fabrics and Textile Market in Guangzhou are given a new life. Layered, stitched and shaped, the soft fabric becomes a landscape of exposed scars. Through such transformation, the artist places these material changes in dialogue with the many ways in which women use and live with fabric, and with their complex relationships to labour and family. In All Rivers Shall Meet Again, Li Xiaotong continues her enquiry into everyday life and its sensory ruptures. The artist weaves together the rhythms of nature, the cycles of the city and the inner movements of the individual through a generative moving image based on tidal data at Huangpu Port, an urban soundscape, and three ink-and-salt works in which the tide is held, for a moment, in crystallised form. Zhang Yingfang’s Luojiao traces the connections between bodily experience, kinship and vernacular knowledge. Soup lies at the heart of the work, bringing together moving image and a handmade book to stir the memories and emotions of those who have left home. Across these works, experiences of place settle into fabric, tides, soup and bodily memory, continuing to reverberate through everyday materials and experiment in media.

'Luojiao', 'sea-crossing', 'wandering', 'touch the river', 'electrical system', 'flesh of the soil', 'new mountain’… Coining new words, or opening up new meanings within familiar ones, is itself a form of action. These words mark a series of unfinished learning journeys: how to draw close to a river, how to step into a wild place, how to hear the typhoon echoes across different bodies, and how to find our place amid the migrations of soup, fabric, tides and plants. The exhibition does not seek to confine these works within fixed categories. It aims to allow the works to speak to one another through their interwoven themes, materials and experiences. How might we reconnect with a world that is complex, damaged and ultimately beyond our grasp when there seems no way forward? Perhaps, before any answer has taken shape, and while we remain unable to fully understand one another, we can still slowly create another language into being through perception, co-existence and practice.

The exhibition also features two special sections: Seeds Cinema and Seeds Library. Seeds Cinema presents special screenings of Chen Ruicheng’s Land of the Floating: Sinking Sea Ranch, created during the first edition of the Seeds Project, and Chen Qiheng’s How Orchids Think: Become(ing) Orchids. Both works, grounded in the lives of particular species and the realities of place, speak directly to this year’s theme of the Seed Project. Seeds Library showcases a collection of books and source materials that have inspired the current participants and mentors in their research and creative practices. In parallel to the exhibition, the 2026 Seeds Project has invited the artist Cheng Xinhao and the ecological art researcher and artist Jin Lipeng to lead workshops, and has launched a residency programme. Together, these activities complete the 2026 Seeds Project titled ‘Earthward Assembly’. The Seeds Project is not intended to end with the feature exhibition. It aspire to catalyse exchanges between artists at different stages of their development and to keep collective learning alive within the community by sharing the creative affinities and connections that emerge among previous and current participants.         

Stephanie Sipei Lu

Associate Research Fellow

Research Centre for New Art Museum Studies, 

Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts

The very name of the Seeds Project: Education Programs for a Sustainable Future carries within it a gesture of growth—though small, a seed holds the potential to break through the soil; and "sustainability" is not a single season of cultivation, but an ongoing process of watering and companionship. In 2023, The Art Journal and CHANEL jointly launched this educational initiative, with the aim of "embracing new ecologies, discovering new generations, and nurturing new creations." Over the past four years, the program has established deep collaborations with many art institutions focused on ecological and environmental issues. Now in its second edition, Seeds Project operates on a two-year cycle for each iteration, openly calling for project proposals from young creators currently enrolled in universities nationwide. Through workshops, exhibitions, residencies, and other formats, it has gradually built a platform that fosters both ecological art practice and educational development.

The Seeds Project weaves a cross-disciplinary and transnational network of exchange and dialogue, allowing knowledge and experience from fields such as art, ecology, architecture, design, and anthropology to interpenetrate one another. Selected participants, together with artists, curators, architects, and scientists at the forefront of ecological thought and artistic practice, become companions in "co-learning." Across disciplines, between theory and practice, between local knowledge and global perspectives, through mutual exchange and inspiration, we believe that genuine insight is born in the spaces that transcend boundaries.

The Seeds Project is rooted in local natural, historical, and cultural contexts, while actively engaging with international currents of thought and practice. In the 2025 "Island of Coexistence" exchange, co-learning, and creation support project, co-organized with the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, "shareable local knowledge" became the year's core theme. During the co-learning process with mentors from Singapore, Thailand, and China across various disciplines, the participants' studies extended far beyond the classroom—they ventured into the villages, ancestral halls, and waterways of Xiaoguwei Island, observed local vegetation and birdlife, visited artist studios and art spaces, and experienced the interweaving of local communities, historical spaces, and the natural environment. Co-learning exchanges, fieldwork, and artistic reflection were integrated into a dense yet open field of shared learning.

The expansion across disciplinary dimensions, cognitive approaches, and creative environments has also been subtly transforming the soil in which Seeds Project grows. If the 2025 edition, under the theme "Island of Coexistence," asked the question "how can local experience be shared?", then the 2026 "Earthward Assembly" series of projects seeks to advance this questioning toward a new consensus. "Earthward" points both to a closeness to the land, while also suggesting a humble turn: creators establish a co-existential relationship with the land, waterways, living beings, and even the surrounding infrastructure through embodied practice. The term "Assembly" implies not only the coming together of works, but also the encounters and interweaving of different disciplines, life experiences, and creative methods.

This year's series of programs launched under the name “Earthward Assembly," includes a thematic exhibition titled “Roots, Currents, Storms: Rehearsing a Language to Come”, featuring works by the 12 selected groups (17 participants) of the Seeds Project, “Seeds Dialogues” Artist Workshop and Seeds Artist-in-Residence Project. “Earthward Assembly” is a extension of "Island of Coexistence"—descending further from a state of co-habitation, bending down to perceive how vegetation symbiotically grows within the soil, how water currents carry personal memories, how the energy of storms is transformed within the environment, and how one may sense the warmth of life through everyday fabrics and broths… Just as ecology studies the interrelationships between organisms and their surroundings, what the creators of Seeds Project have gradually unfolded over this two-year creative journey is precisely a heightened sensitivity and capacity for perceiving the world around them and its interconnections.

Looking back on the trajectory of Seeds Project from 2023 to the present, it is not merely an accumulation of workshops, exhibitions, and residencies, but rather an ongoing construction of a new educational paradigm. We have sought to bring educational experimentation beyond institutional walls, into fields, communities, and the broader social and natural landscape. The young creators immersed in this process are, step by step, finding a language of connection with all living things in the real world.

The Seeds Project continues to grow, spreading and connecting like a mycelial network. It does not pursue centralized control, but channels information, nutrients, and energy through the underground network to where they are most needed. It does not rush to build grand structures above the surface, but weaves resilient webs among the roots and rhizomes, enriching the entire soil—making it fertile, permeable, and vibrant. When the conditions are right, fruiting bodies will naturally emerge from the soil—and even rings of mushrooms will appear in abundance.

One day, when we look back at this moment, we will recognize that all of today's painstaking cultivation is providing indispensable nourishment for a more inclusive, more sensitive, and more action-oriented art-educational ecology. To carry out the experiment in ecological arts education through the cultivation of ecology itself is not to shape a predetermined future, but to cultivate the organic soil for the seeds of tomorrow, so that they may find ever more possibilities for germination.

Ye Ying
Editor-in-Chief, The Art Journal
Founder, Seeds Project: Education Programs for a Sustainable Future