Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #13
Can museum be a spring, a forest?
— Museum-ing wanwu 萬物 space for more-than-human entanglements[i]
— Museum-ing wanwu 萬物 space for more-than-human entanglements[i]
November 27, 2023
Light, very light, lithic vortex.
A kaleidoscope of aggregates and dispersions: planetary climate, statecraft, geopolitical configuration, environmental engineering, and calculus of indefinite decay. Pollen, flies, debris, silt, spores and lichens, in a silenced spring.
— Shuyi Cao, Dust, Railing Codex
In their article “Ecological Art Practices in a Good Anthropocene,” published in Journal of the National Academy of Art in 2018, Chinese artist Zheng Bo raises the question, “How to define art within the context of Anthropocene?”[ii] They write,
Defining art as human’s aesthetic event; considering creation as human-exclusive activity; constructing museum as human-centric space—these are all based on the binary logic of natural-social opposition. If we desire venturing towards a good, or a “benevolent” Anthropocene, perhaps we should consider art as the earth’s aesthetics, creation as wanwu 萬物 (ten thousand things/myriad happenings) activity, and museums as wanwu 萬物 space.[iii]
When confronting our post-pandemic human condition, that is, struggling to survive and to create in the capitalist ruins of wars, climate catastrophes, and the sixth extinction of species,[iv] the artist further announces, “Art history needs to be re-written; modern ways of artistic creation need to be overturned, museums need to be reconstructed.”[v] Zheng’s statement directs a “call-to-action” for recognizing and embodying “more-than-human”[vi] entanglements within the system of art creation, production, and exhibition. More-than-human not only refers to the expansive terrain of species and matters such as plants, animals, geological substances, memories, spirits… where humans do not dominate but are part of the assemblage of beings. It proposes a form of worldly engagement that is material, elemental, and inherently toward the process of de-anthropocentrism. In this light, we may regard “more-than-human” as one of the interpretations of “wanwu 萬物,” the Daoist notion of the myriad happenings. Zheng’s calling for wanwu space thus acquires a radical departure from the conventional understanding of museum—according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, a building or a part of a building set aside as a repository and display place for objects relating to art, literature, or science[vii]—toward a space that hosts different temporalities and cultivates the liveliness of (not-just-human-)beings.
This is not to assume that art museums nowadays are standardized, monolithic organisations. Yet, no matter what kind of aesthetic concepts or social functions they are subjected to, be it Pompidou Metz, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Rockbound Museum of Art in Shanghai, or MALBA in Buenos Aires, all these museums are, more or less, structured as anthropocentric institutions that celebrate man-made aesthetic narratives prioritizing “ways of seeing.”[viii] In Radical Museology, when considering the global panorama of contemporary art museums, Claire Bishop reflects, “What binds them all together is less a concern for a collection, a history, a position, or a mission than a sense that contemporaneity is being staged on the level of image: the new, the cool, the photogenic, the well-designed, the economically successful.[ix]
Within this context, wanwu space further evokes urgent questions to artistic researchers and practitioners of our time: instead of shining the spotlight only on the human-created artifacts on display in a well-protected, highly-designed, enclosed chamber, how can we create a space that nurtures the process of artistic creation? How can the activity of visiting a museum go beyond staged spectatorship and embrace all possible forms of sensual perceptions across matters, landscapes, and beings? If wanwu space becomes one of the tangible imaginations of future museums, what kind of audience experience could be inspired and activated from immersing in such a space? Could it be synced with sensing the scents of a spring or feeling the touch of a forest, that is, transforming the anthropocentric institutional discourse into a kind of “fantastic institution”[x] that cherishes all forms of beings and intelligence?
In searching for palpable answers, this essay attempts to examine wanwu as a methodology in proposing what a museum could be through situating this very space within the abundant relationships among beings. That is, instead of inventing new definitions of institutional museum discourse in the era of the (so-called) Anthropocene, this essay attempts to interweave possible imaginations on what kind of happening, phenomenon, and organism a museum could become. In this light, Zheng Bo’s wanwu practice, Wanwu Council 萬物社, at Gropius Bau, Berlin (2021), and the artist collective La Intermudial Holobiente’s site-specific book, The Book of the Ten Thousand Things, exhibited at documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022), offer novel reflections and prototypes. They expand the enclosed, human-inclusive museum chamber into open and transformative wanwu spaces. Embodying wanwu, Zheng Bo’s practice and The Book of the Ten Thousand Things both suggest that museum could be experienced as a shapeshifting body that disorients the hierarchical structure of sensory perceptions; a playground that cultivates sensibility; and a refuge for more-than-human entanglements. To unfold such “be-comings” of museums, we may start by revisiting the notion of wanwu.
Figure 1. Zheng Bo: Wanwu Council 萬物社, final presentation and discussion of the manifestos, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo © Laura Fiorio.
Deeply rooted in ancient Chinese wisdom, wanwu 萬物 is a way to experience the world. Or rather, my Chinese grandma always says that wanwu is how the world began. Linguistically, “wan 萬” means ten thousand, and “wu 物” indicates objects, happenings, and phenomena. When braiding these two strings of meaning together, “ten thousand things” or “myriad happenings” emerge. This concept dates back to the sixth century BCE and was thoroughly discussed in Laozi’s Dao De Jing 道德經. When delineating the birth of the cosmos, Laozi wrote,
道生一,
Out of Dao, One is born;
一生二,
Out of One, Two;二生三,
Out of Two, Three
三生萬物。Out of Three, the created universe.
萬物負陰而抱陽,
The created universe carries the yin at its back and the yang in front;充氣以為和。
Through the union of the pervading principles it reaches harmony.[xi]
Here, I use one of the most prominent English translations of Dao De Jing, published in 1948 by one of the most important contemporary Chinese scholars and novelists, Lin Yutang.[xii] It is worth noting that in the original Chinese version, what Lin translated as “the created universe” was in fact wanwu. In other versions, wanwu has been translated into “ten thousand things,” “myriad creatures,” “multiplicity of beings,” “manifold of everything that is happening,” and the latest, “more-than-human,” among others.[xiii] These translations, no matter how different in their semantic formulations, point to a mutually shared aliveness, multiplicity, and diversity. Wanwu does not merely limit itself within the quantitive account of objects and things. The figure of “ten-thousand” rather refers to “vast,” “unbounded,” “manifold,” “particular,” “manifest,” “emergent,” and even a bit “miscellaneous.”[xiv] Such ambiguity and in-betweenness, often flowing in traditional Chinese rhetoric, give space to wanwu’s interpretation and levitate it is an opening which harbors every single existence that vibrates in (and in between) the cosmos. Second, is it crucial to note how wanwu comes into existence from the gathering together and the transformation of Qi 氣, the vital life force that activates and supports all living entities. Various forms of qi, as “the pervading principles,” bring wanwu back into the harmonic oneness with different strings of force that might seem to be oppositional. Yet the forces of wanwu have never been oppositional but relational, a relationality profoundly reflected in Chinese rhetoric. Taking yinyang 陰陽 as an example, in Western translations, yinyang is often addressed as “yin and yang.” In its original Chinese articulation, however, instead of speaking about yin and yang, the Chinese parlance has always been “yinyang.” There is no conjunction between the two characters to formulate the word as a whole. Absence of conjunctions such as “and” suggests a critically different approach as to how these two forces come together. In ancient Chinese wisdom, “yinyang” is not considered as two separate forces being arranged together, but is in itself a different state of transformations that are subjected to the same cadenced flow of experience. This semantic phenomenon reflects Daoist cosmology and is essential to the conception of wanwu: “ten thousands” are originated from the inseparable “one,” as the integrity of “becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things.”[xv]
This radical relationality explains the human position as being part of the web of the world’s fundamental intra-connectedness. If humans are but one of these ten thousand things, or even if each human is only one of a myriad of always emergent things, happenings, phenomena, then there are alternative possibilities of entanglements which enable us, the contemporary human creatures,[xvi] to retrace our relational connections with and among more-than-human entities. In this light, we may conclude that the notion of wanwu is not only a way to perceive and experience worlds. More importantly, it embalms profound potential to serve as an epistemological foundation for museums to shift the artistic, ecological, and sociopolitical focal point from a human-inclusive world that is constructed by “man,” toward a more complex and vibrant cosmological multispecies origin as a return to wanwu entanglements. This return is not a conjecture stemming from pure imagination. Sprouting from wanwu, Zheng Bo’s Wanwu Council 萬物社 and La Intermudial Holobiente’s The Book of the Ten Thousand Things are the fruitful fabulations that bring wanwu space into being. Throughout this process, they subvert the spatial authority of a museum space where the proliferated man-made institutional power is exercised into porous, relational bodies of myriad happenings.
In one of the exhibition rooms at Gropius Bau, where Zheng Bo’s Wanwu Council 萬物社 (2021) takes place, twelve human creatures stand in a circle. With open palms, they slowly raise their arms toward the direction of “heaven.” Their eyes wide open, their senses alert, their feet anchor their bodies to the center of Earth. They look focused, attentive. As if casting an ancient spell, these twelve human creatures enter in a process of “channeling” the energy of weeds, water, plane trees, bees, spirits, microbes, communities, seasons, light, histories, soil, and foxes. This “channeling,” facilitated by Zheng Bo, does not end in the museum but further leads them into the woods. In the Grumsin forest at Brandenburg, the same human creatures gather around in a circle with trees, weeds, fungi, all sorts of living beings, breathing, seeing, listening, smelling, tasting, sensing, extending that spell of “channeling” into “a collective manifesto” to “cultivate new sensibilities and practices for a more-than-human future at the Gropius Bau and beyond.”[xvii]
Concerning the question “How can art institutions move towards a more-than-human future?”[xviii] Zheng Bo’s initiation of Wanwu Council Meeting is a crucial part of their exhibition Wanwu Council 萬物社, resulting from the artist’s one-year in-house residency at the Gropius Bau in 2021. This work meeting includes events of channeling, dialoguing, Dao De Jing reading, and wandering together. The images captured during the “channeling” process might look out of place, especially when situating this happening within the context of an institutional “work meeting.” Yet perhaps this is one of the very few occasions for an art museum like Gropius Bau to follow a different paradigm, as an attempt to dissemble the conventional bureaucracies and hierarchies, and to experiment with a different future through series of embodied practices—in this case, through “channeling” wanwu. Drawing from Daoist tradition, this meeting can be considered as a form of ritualistic practice that shares agency with weeds, water, plane trees, bees, spirits, microbes, communities, seasons, light, histories, soil, and foxes. These twelve strings of living energy are particularly associated with the museum’s geological and ecological system: the flourishing plane trees form the “Gropius Wood,” the microbes have already been colonizing the building and space, the bees and foxes occasionally fly in and run out of sight… the so-called museum, the Gropius Bau, in this sense is not just a historical architecture hosting the ready-made art artifacts, but in fact a multispecies commune that is, as Zheng Bo proposes throughout their exhibition, “already more-than-human.”[xix] Such recognitions and emphasis on the geological and ecological entanglements which have shaped the museum space is crucial. It foregrounds the radical relationality among wanwu as the fundamental base for artistic propositions. This makes me wonder: Haven’t museums always been embedded with their specific geological and ecological histories, memories, and entanglements that are more-than-human?
Indeed, it is not difficult to discover museums’ profound connections with more-than-human entities. When tracing back to the origin of museum, mouseion in ancient Greek refers to the temple dedicated to the divine energy of arts and sciences. Rather than simply viewing a static “exhibition,” the visit to a museum in fact interlaces all kinds of ritualistic experience through being aspired and inspired by “supernatural” forces. These forces, be they human nor non-human, are used to be described as the “muse” who illuminates the artists’ creations. In “The Art Museum as Ritual,” Carol Duncan discusses the relationship between art museums and temples where ritualistic and ceremonial practices are hosted. She writes,
Museums resemble older ritual sites not so much because of their specific architectural references but because they, too, are settings for rituals. Like most ritual space, museum space is carefully marked off the culturally designated as reserved for a special quality of attention—in this case, for contemplation and learning.[xx]
In this regard, Zheng Bo’s “channeling work meeting” at Gropius Bau is significant, especially when relating to the ethnological history of museums. It reminds us of museum’s ritualistic origin, which seems to get lost when recalling Bishop’s reflection on contemporary art museums and the tendency of becoming eyeful spectacles rather than embodiments. It is worth noting that this ritualistic return evoked by Zheng’s practice is not necessarily religious in an anthropocentric way, but rather roots in a secular spirituality that is based on and expands from the earthy connection with wanwu. For the very first time, a German art museum, the Gropius Bau, sends out its invitation to sensuous beings that are outside the standard taxonomy of “human,” wishing to form embodied dialogues as part of their multispecies encounters (even just temporarily).
These dialogues and encounters in turn transform the Gropius Bau into a wanwu space that is post-representational. It means that whatever happens within is not meant to educate the “crowd” but to co-create with the “practitioners.” In fact, what distinguishes the transformation of wanwu space from forms of live art is the vanishing of the “crowd” as the “spectators.” Instead of being a performance, the “channeling work meeting” carries different purposes. There are neither spectators nor spectacles when the channeling takes place. It focuses more on inviting more-than-human entities to join the museum dialogues with the guidance of ancient wisdom, in this case, the Daoist practice. Particularly, as an act of mediation, to channel is to channel with—to sync with, side by side, tuning in with one another, be it weeds, water, trees, bees, spirits, microbes, communities, seasons, light, histories, soil, or foxes. It is a collective ritual that brings back the original tradition of what makes a museum mouseion—a secular temple, the “sacred space”[xxi] to be inspired, and perhaps enlightened by the divine energy of the myriad happenings. Wanwu space is therefore no longer subjected to the gaze of the individual sovereign master. It is no longer about “ways of seeing,” but ways of hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and sensing together with(in) “ten thousand things.”
The Book of the Ten Thousand Things consists of a collection of books that “circulate and travel from the desk of a correspondent to the workshop of another and from there to someone else’s and so on successively, moving between places that shelter them while likewise sheltering voices, scripts, and images. Thus, each of these books can be seen as a nomadic residence for artists, as a particular method of translation, as an infinite non-representational creative process, as an experiment in co-organization and collective creation, or as all these things at the same time.”[xxii]
Sharing much of wanwu spirit in common, The Book of the Ten Thousand Things[xxiii] created by La Intermundial Holobiente, the interdisciplinary group that attempts to invent more-than-human imaginative practices, shapes a different kind of wanwu space as a “museum-ing-body” that challenges the anthropocentric artistic experience. As part of Lumbung artists of documenta fifteen, La Intermundial Holobiente,[xxiv] using the collective’s own term, “mediates the creation of an intermundial document for documenta: The Book of the Ten Thousand Things,” that is, the book of wanwu. One can already find traces of wanwu in the collective’s name. An imaginary language inspired by the Daoist notion of wanwu and Lynn Margulis’s evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis, “La Intermundial Holobiente,” translated as “the in-betweenery holobiont,” is a fictional entity that celebrates the planetary “intra-connectedness” of all things.
Created by fourteen artists and writers from Argentina, together with the ten thousand things within and around them, The Book of the Ten Thousand Things is the collective’s first attempt to co-write with more-than-human entities based on a shared axiom: the centers of the pages are occupied by invisible texts written in indeterminate languages by non-human authors. In this way, a collection of books composed by various “holobiente authors” gradually takes shape, weaving all kinds of sensuous stories, images, characters, both visible and invisible. These visible and invisible figurations form an “archive of heterogeneous material adopting the form of a book, which can be read in multiple directions.”[xxv] As a result, The Book of the Ten Thousand Things requires a different approach to reading. As the artists themselves announced, “We don’t quite know how this book should be read.” Yet they still proposed a series of joyful practices:
Reading only the chapters that include the names of plants, reading as if our eyes were the nose of a mole, reading as if the pages were a starling murmuration, reading like an oracle, reading outside on days when the boreal wind blows, reading according to what attracts the eye, reading by cropping and reordering the parts, reading only the pages that include the color blue. [xxvi]
These reading practices transform “reading” into “experiencing,” or rather, reclaiming the ontology of reading as experiencing, the kind of experience that is embodied, manifold, collectively manifested by the human reader with and as part of the ten thousand things—wanwu.
For me, this experience evolves into a journey of “encountering” wanwu in the form of a site-specific book inhabiting in an expansive, vibrant, forest museum body. As the collection of books finds its soil to root and grow on the Karlsaue wetland, located on the banks of the river Fulda, my journey began with an early train ride from Berlin to Kassel. Accompanied by the misty fog of dawn, I passed by the empty town hall, crossed through Friedrichsplatz, and wandered into the Karlsaue Park. As if entering a lucid dream, I remembered the early bird chirps in the misty forest, as a far sea moved into my ears while being surprised by the curious mushrooms popping out of the earth. I remember seeing the morning dews dripping from the fragile leaves like crystal tears. I made some stops, took some turns, rested among the quiet trees, and listened to the winds whispering through dappled sunlight and insect wings, like a voice that echoed all the sounds in the cosmos. The sound became the bird; the sound became the mushrooms, for which I followed into the deeper constellations of trees. Trees were stars, shimmering in the puddle of a greenery sky. They led me further into the opening of a world that The Book of the Ten Thousand Things inhabits. Guarded by two pneumatic spirits floating in the sky (as a vivid figuration of Qi 氣), swinging toward the direction where the wind blew, a little wooden hut appeared in the midst of a pulsating landscape where nested the ferns, sunflowers, mushrooms, dandelions, pine trees, microbes, and various other vegetations and beings—a wanwu space that is alive.
Everything existed like dream figures as the journey continued. The two white helium balloons were connected by a gigantic theater drape which mirrored the landscape into translucent mirage, constantly transformed by winds, lights, temperature, and the humidity of the environment. When entering the hut, one hundred unbound copies of The Book of the Ten Thousand Things and anthotypes made on-site were available for visitors to read, write, edit, translate, ponder, create, and experience in various ways. Besides the Sublunar Nocturne concert for more-than-human entities, conversations on Cosmopolitics of Aue, the Holobiente Trail for human children, and other series of on-site events organized by the collective, one can simply rest on the chair to sculpt a moment of being there. Aiming to reactivate our forgotten contact with the abundant non-human beings around and within us, this wanwu space, just like Wanwu Council, is a fractal enfolding of all kinds of happening. These happenings generate an artistic experience that is relationally individual and at the same time collective. Now the question is, can space as such, the space that falls out of the cognitive-capitalist-oriented contemporaneity—this affable oasis—collectively curated, created, archived (in their bodies and memories) by artists, writers, musicians, children, multidisciplinary-becomings, winds, trees, sounds, matters, all sorts of more-than-human entities, conjugate a museum space? In other words, instead of those “eye-popping over-scaled buildings destined to house art and performance” such as the Louvre or Guggenheim Abu Dhabi,[xxvii] can the contemporary art museum be “open” like a spring or a forest? Does museum require any fixated material constructions like concrete and walls, or standardized discourses like an institutional and economical structure to become a museum? These questions manifest themselves when “museum” becomes a verb, and when this absolute architectural entity shifts into ongoing processes that (re-) generate living experiences—a process of “museum-ing.”
In his article Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk, Boris Groys discusses how we come to the understanding of museum not a storage place for artworks, but rather as a stage for the flow of art events. That is to say, “the contemporary museum has ceased to be a space for contemplating non-moving things. Instead, the museum has become a place where things happen.”[xxviii] In this sense, to consider “archiving” as one of the traditional functions of a museum, the task then becomes documentation of these events, since, according to Groys, one cannot reproduce a curatorial event like an artwork but only document it. He writes,
Contemporary museum exhibitions are full of documentations of past artistic events, shown alongside traditional works of art. Thus, the museum turns the documentation of an old event into an element of a new event. It ascribes this documentation a new here and now—and as such gives it a new aura.[xxix]
Groys’s observation reflects the limitation of the traditional perception of museum, as it shows that most contemporary museums still function based on the standardized linearity of anthropocentric art history self-acclaiming to be “universal.” What if time flows in a circular fashion? What if there are multiple temporal-spatialities to be perceived, yet remain invisible to the modern human blindness? How about the more-than-human entities and their artistic practices that exist outside of the linear time-space paradigm? Can a museum become a forest that expands in multi-directions and embraces all kinds of sensuous beings and happenings? These questions take us back to the crucial opening question: How to transform museum into wanwu space? In this sense, to emancipate museum from the haunted graveyard of art objects to “a stage for the flow of art events” is just the very fist step. In fact, museum should not only rely on, in Groys’s terms, the “reproduction of art objects” nor “documentation of the curatorial events,”[xxx] lingering in the endless nostalgia of the so-called past, but to actively create the present living experience, and to cherish the process of that creation. In other words, “museum” must become “museum-ing” to open itself for accommodating the more-than-human demands of our times, where past and future collapse onto the pulsating present.
In this light, Charles Esche proposes a shift from the “decay” to the “liveness” in museum practice:
One thing that I talk about a lot now is this idea that we are collecting relations rather than objects. And what I mean by that is we’re also collecting a series of relations between the people as well as relations between the archive and the collection, between the objects themselves… and relationships are living, and if it’s living you need to respond to it…. Whereas the museum can often get stuck on this idea of conservation and preservation and forget that the flexibility of life is something that also belongs in it.[xxxi]
To museum is thus to relate, to sprout based on these living entanglements of wanwu, to practice instead of present[xxxii] the alternative way of interweaving relations; and finally, to experience the liveliness and the dynamism of such processes. In this regard, Wanwu Council and The Book of the Ten Thousand Things have shown what kind of experience it generates when “museum” becomes a verb, a process toward wanwu space. Both of these happenings stem from recognizing the geopolitical and ecological specificity of the spatial realms where the artistic events take place, one at the Gropius Bau, the other at the feral area of Karlsaue Park. They propose a paradigm shift from considering museum as a static ontological construction that hosts abstracted art objects being arranged in symbolic circulations to an act, an ongoing transformation of “museum-ing” in relations. Through this transformation, these two happenings open up an enclosed architecture haunted by the death of “still life” and manmade discourses into affable processes of “giving life to lives” through the act of practicing and experiencing. These new forms of museum engage more-than-human entities as active participants in the creation of the practices and experiences and, along with the process, museum becomes the wanwu space. Wanwu space in turn liberates museum from the traditionally pre-assumed constructions and standardizations to become that very porous, relational body, shapeshifting into the playground that fosters our forgotten sensibility and curiosity; the refuge that allows differences and perspectives to meet, collide, and find one another; and the “living forest” that expands within the echoes of ten thousand things.
Yiou Penelope Peng|彭憶歐
Previously trained as a pianist and a scholar in cinema studies at Smith College, University College of London, Yiou is now a PhD candidate at Free University Berlin for her research on the “touch,” “transformation,” and “collision” among non-human and human entities in performative happenings. She attempts to interweave a speculative performance analysis about plants, matter, cyborgs, spirits, aliens, and indefinable beings from more-than-human perspectives.
Yiou practices (embodied writing), creates (psychedelic poetry), and dreams (of pink tardigrades) softly. Her artistic research has published in Performance Research; Journal of Body, Space, Technology; Heichi Magazine; Spike Art Magazine, So-far Online, AQNB, Ars Electronica, Ocula, among others.
[i] This piece of writing is partially developed from the chapter “Wanwu 萬物 as performative agents,” included in the author’s ongoing doctoral research, Towards a more-than-human performativity.
[ii] Anthropocene refers to the geologic epoch in which humans have become the major force determining the changes in Earth’s geological and ecological systems.
[iii] Zheng Bo, “善良人類世之生態藝術實踐 Ecological Art Practices in a Good Anthropocene,” 新美術 Journal of the National Academy of Art 39, no. 6 (2018): 8.
[iv] The sixth extinction of species, also referred as the “Holocene extinction” or “Anthropocene extinction,” indicating the loss of biodiversity and species extinction, has enormously accelerated during the past 100–200 years due to human activities on Earth.
[v] Zheng Bo, Wanwu (Cologne: Walther König, 2023), 20.
[vi] I am aware this term could be problematic due to an orientational axis which still appoints the “human.” However, this term could serve as an intermediate state for approaching equivalence among living entities as a process of deconstructing the centralized power held in the anthropocentric notion of “human.”
[vii] Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed March 12, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/word/museum#etymonline_v_19294
[viii] See John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
[ix] Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Cologne: Walther König, 2013), 12.
[x] I refer to the “Fantastic Institution” project organized by arts center BUDA in 2020. This project is a three-day symposium which invites artists, scholars, dramaturges, curators, and artistic directors to reflect on the alternative imaginations of decentralized institutions (especially art institutions). More information can be found here: https://www.kunsten.be/en/now-in-the-arts/the-fantastic-institution/.
[xi]Lao Zi, The Wisdom of Laotse, trans. and ed. Lin Yutang (New York: Random House, 1948), 214.
[xii] I chose this translation version because it contains the original concision and style of Lao Zi’s writing in ancient Chinese. It might sound strange within an anglophone context, yet it is translated with the least interpretation from the translator. It is worth noting that Lin Yutang is regarded as a “master of language” in Chinese literature. He is an influential figure in linguistics, fiction, translation, and literary criticism in contemporary China. His translation of Dao De Jing is the most renowned version in Chinese-English literary studies in China.
[xiii] In Dutch, “Alle dingen”; in German, “Alles Lebendige” or “Alle Dinge”; and in French, “Tous Les êtres,” among others.
[xiv] Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 14.
[xv] Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), 16.
[xvi] By “contemporary human creatures,” I mean the human creature who participates in the process of the global production and consumption chain.
[xvii] “Wanwu Council,” accessed March 12, 2023, https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropiusbau/programm/2021/zheng-bo/wanwu-council.html.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Zheng, Wanwu, 20.
[xx] Carol Duncan, “The Art Museum as Ritual,” Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 9–10.
[xxi] Here, “sacred” does not necessarily refer to worship for religious purposes, but “sacred” in a sense of feeling connected with a living being. For example, in Wanwu, Zheng Bo describes the experience when he spends time with a tree. He says, “I’m now standing under a tree on the beach. If I come and stand under this tree every day, a feeling will soon arise in me that this tree is sacred. This place is sacred. And other people will also start to sense the sacredness. Just by iterating very simple acts, we can learn to sense the sacredness of a place.”
[xxii] La Intermundial Holobiente, “Prologue,” The Book of the Ten Thousand Things, accessed March 12, 2023, https://claudiafontes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/La-Intermundial-Holobiente_-Prologue-to-The-Book-of-the-Ten-Thousand-Things.pdf.
[xxiii] For a visual encounter with the book, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orMGgHIdv4Q.
[xxiv] La Intermundial Holobiente is initiated by Paula Fleisner (philosopher), Claudia Fontes (artist), Pablo M. Ruiz (writer), and many others.
[xxv] La Intermundial Holobiente, The Book of the Ten Thousand Things, 22.
[xxvi] Ibid., 23.
[xxvii] Bishop, Radical Museology, 12.
[xxviii] Boris Groys, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” e-flux Journal, no. 50 (2013), accessed March 14, 2023, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/50/59974/entering-the-flow-museum-between-archive-and-gesamtkunstwerk/.
[xxix] Ibid.
[xxx] Ibid.
[xxxi] Charles Esche, interview, in RE: MUSEUM, ed. Wato Tsereteli (Tbilisi: Goethe Institut Georgien, 2014), 25.
[xxxii] This reflects Sarah Vanhee’s performance lecture “The Art Institution as a Hole in the Ground,” as part of the discussion on Fantastic Institutions. In the lecture, Vanhee expresses her desire of longing for art institutions to practice alternative politics instead of presenting art programs about alternative politics.
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