A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

Qiu Ying’s Garden for Solitary Pleasure and Zheng Bo’s Ecosensibility Exercise: Fragrant Eight-Section Brocade are dramatically different artworks created nearly five centuries apart against disparate societal, economic, and ecological backdrops. Nevertheless, they share fundamental understandings about the natural world and humans’ place within it—understandings that originated in classical China nearly 2500 years ago but that have renewed relevance today. Together, these remarkable works point to humans’ entanglement with the myriad beings of the cosmos and to the ethical responsibilities that we hold toward them all.

Crafted in the mid-sixteenth century by the professional painter Qiu Ying, Garden for Solitary Pleasure is a long handscroll that depicts the private garden of Sima Guang (1019–1086), a scholar and statesman active centuries earlier. During a period of political turmoil, Sima Guang retired to his Garden for Solitary Pleasure to read, to write, and to study plants. Writings by Sima and his contemporaries document that the small garden was composed of several scenic areas, including a Hall for Reading Books, a Watering Flowers Pavilion, and most importantly, a Plot for Picking Medicines. In this latter space, Sima planted 120 different kinds of medicinal herbs, which he carefully labeled so that he might learn their names, recognize their forms, and observe their lifecycles. In other words, Sima used this garden to engage in a form of botany, the foundational mode of plant science. During the years that he resided in the garden, he wrote many poems about his medicinal plants, which he seems to have frequently exchanged with friends. Some of Sima’s writings are appended to the end of this painting.

Like most scholars in historical China, Sima did not study plants simply for knowledge’s sake. Rather, he conceptualized such study as part of a broader process of self-cultivation. To learn about plants, animals, or even rocks was to learn about the world of which one was a part. Indeed, most Chinese thinkers understood that Heaven, Earth, and Humans collectively constituted what we today might simply call “nature”; none of these three elements was, or even could conceivably be, separated from the others. Moreover, these scholars generally believed that qi, a kind of universal energy-matter, suffused all beings in the cosmos. In other words, everything—from humans to plants, from clouds to deities—were fundamentally linked through the physical stuff of their being.

In some sense, the fact that all things shared the same energy-matter enmeshed them in network of ethical responsibilities. Heaven, Earth, and Humans all were obligated to care for each other; only then could the cosmos function as it should. In a touching statement of our fundamental sameness, one of Sima’s contemporaries even claimed that clearing the weeds on a stone step was unconscionable because those grasses shared the same lifeforce with us humans.

In Ecosensibility Exercise: Fragrant Eight-Section Brocade, the Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo reinterprets these notions for the present. Fundamentally, the work is a practice that Zheng created for themself to perform in order to better connect with landscape; the video documentation is supplementary. To create the practice, Zheng adapted eight classic qigong exercises—that is, exercises developed to stimulate the flow of energy-matter within the practitioner’s body. Rather than focusing solely on the practitioner, Zheng instead encourages the practitioner to exchange qi with the surrounding ecosystem. While performing the exercises, the practitioner inhales the aromas (known as xiangqi, literally “fragrant qi”) of leaves, roots, mud, and even mountains, and exhales their own breath (qixi, literally “qi-breath”). Through this process, practitioner and landscape become linked in a cycle of energy-matter interchange.

This is one of many practices that Zheng Bo has developed to train themself to “connect better with nature, and to live a better life on this planet.” Their motivations are varied but largely stem from the conviction that it is only by cultivating ourselves to develop profound, personal connections with plants that we may become able to live more sustainably in this world. Connecting with landscape—and knowing plants in an intimate way—becomes an ethical act.

Together, Garden for Solitary Pleasure and Ecosensibility Exercise: Fragrant Eight-Section Brocade offer powerful encouragement to rethink conventional contemporary understandings of nature, the goals of inquiry into the natural world (that is, “science” loosely defined), and the ethics of human engagement with both.