Gaia Should Be Safe - 美凯龙艺术中心 Macalline Center of Art

Gaia Should Be Safe

2024.11.03—2025.02.23

Artists: Josephine Baker, Julius von Bismarck, Kent Chan, Chloé Delarue, Femke Herregraven, Sonia Levy, Vibeke Mascini, Jonas Staal, Xi Lei, Zhuang Hui, Zheng Yuan

Curator: Yang Beichen

The year was 1956, a period of rapid growth for the newly founded People's Republic of China. In June of that year, Mao Zedong headed South to inspect the ongoing construction of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge and embraced the Yangtze water in three remarkable swims. The Southern Tour inspired the Chairman–poet to compose the famous Prelude to the Water Melody: Swimming, from which the title of this exhibition is derived from the poem’s final lines: Should the goddess be safe and sound, she'll view th' changing world with surprise. In reference to the Goddess Peak overlooking Wu Gorge, one of the Three Gorges on the Yangtze, the figure of "the goddess" also suggests another layer of meaning, echoing the myth of infrastructure development that marked the early days of socialist China. A monument of and by nature, the Goddess Peak stood in as a crucial referent for this myth, expressing the ambition to conquer nature, transform the landscape, and create a new world. At the same time, the agency of non-human existence seemed to be activated and involved in this transformative process.

The body of the goddess grows as she is continuously planned, designed, and governed, having reached an increasingly planetary scale, a result of the ongoing project of complex and intense terraforming. Man-made megastructures such as reservoirs, dams, canals, solar farms, digital base stations, undersea cables, deep-sea fishing operations, energy extraction sites, and artificial islands have similarly turned into monuments, inscribed with the concomitant shifts in climate, geopolitics, and socio-economic conditions. We must admit that the shaping and reshaping of the Earth have rendered it "alien," even gradually making it into an entirely different planet. She is no longer our "Blue Marble Garden," but a hyper-mediated cybernetic system.

It is within this context the exhibition Gaia Should Be Safe unfolds. It seeks to outline the definition of an “Expanded Geoengineering” and locate the political and poetic significance of this concept, situating the intervention and transformation of the Earth's ecological and climate systems within the broader praxis of humankind. The works on view bring together perspectives from agriculture, hydraulic engineering, infrastructure, and climate control, proposing diverse forms of perception and imagination. Together, they invite a speculative debate around the very question: is Gaia, the goddess of Earth, truly unharmed? As the concluding chapter of Who Owns Nature?, the exhibition engages in close dialogue with the preceding two installments, while directing the focus to human's radical attempts to transform nature. An integral part of the history of humankind, these experiments have also attested to the ultimate entanglement of the human and non-human worlds.

James Lovelock's "Gaia theory" postulates an image of the Earth as a living and breathing being—a unique planet that is super-organic, capable of self-regulating, and equipped with a stable feedback loop. Today, Gaia has evolved into a far more complex organism with greater intelligence, a battleground for competing epistemological and ontological hypotheses. She is a hybrid ecosystem that houses both nature and machine, a technological platform that is operable and computable, a space continuously assembled by living and non-living actors… She is an updated version of Gaia that almost resembles a distributed system, an adaptive network in which matter, energy, life forms, and information repeat the cycle of birth and death. Perhaps, the real question underpinning the exhibition should be: has the goddess achieved rebirth through her transformation?

Gaia Should Be Safe is curated by MACA Director Yang Beichen, with support from Associate Curator Wang Jianan and Assistant Curator Chen Yindi. Special thanks to Sino-Ocean Charity Foundation, Pro Helvetia Shanghai, the Swiss Arts Council, and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands for their support of the exhibition.

Research-based Curatorial Project “Who Owns Nature?”

“Who Owns Nature?” is a research based curatorial project with three chapters at the MACA. It must be acknowledged that the answer to Who Owns Nature? has been different at every period of History. For an 18th-century acknowledged that the answer to “Who Owns Nature?” has been different at every period of History. For an 18th-century Western colonizer, “nature” meant territory and the possessions therein, representing continued appropriation and plunder in the name of “the earth as a commonwealth.” In the eyes of the home-bound or green room-bound naturalists, the exotic flowers and animals that arrived in Europe from the far corners of the world were gifts from God, and all they had to do was to use nomenclature and taxonomy to sort them out and integrate “nature” into the knowledge and trade landscape of the Empire.

In turn, we discovered that objectifying “nature” led to huge historical debts – which certainly explains the double entendre of the question (Who Owns Nature?). We owe something to “nature” precisely because “nature” is seen only as a resource to be transformed and accumulated, and is exploited and expropriated as a pure object until it is exhausted. This is a linear, “progressive” cosmological framework that clearly fails to account for the complex entanglement between us and “nature”. In the Anthropocene, we have long been a multi-scaled existence, just as “nature” has become a multinature at the planetary level, rather than a collection of homogeneous and unchanging entities at the ontological level. “Nature” is both within and beyond us, and our relationship with it is not human versus non-human, but intimately intertwined and interdependent, based on true diversity.

It is precisely in this sense that “Who owns nature?” seeks to re-examine our historical debt with “nature” and to explore a new non-linear cosmological model. This is an interdisciplinary project, in which we will work with different artists, scholars and cultural practitioners to stimulate lively and serious discussions on different issues.

The first and second chapters of Who Owns Nature? series, Multispecies Clouds and Elemental Constellations have already taken place on 2022 and 2023.

About the Curator

Yang Beichen

Dr. Yang Beichen is a researcher and a curator based in Beijing, currently serving as the director of the Macalline Center of Art (MACA), and an associate professor at the Central Academy of Drama. Prior to that, he was a senior editor of Artforum.com.cn (2012-2017) , a guest researcher at the New Century Art Foundation (NCAF, 2019-2021) and one of the members of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada（2021-2023）.

His research explores the agency and potentialities of the moving image in the context of contemporary technology and ecology. Utilizing media archaeology as a radical framework, he excavates alternative modernities and reinterprets history and geopolitics from a New Materialist perspective. His curatorial practices grow out of and attest to his multidisciplinary academic approaches. Notable curatorial projects include “New Metallurgists” (Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf), “Micro-Era” (Kulturforum, Berlin), the Guangzhou Image Triennial 2021 "The Intermingling Flux" (Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou), “Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg: A MOON WRAPPED IN BROWN PAPER” (Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai) , and "Cao Fei: Tidal Flux” (Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai), etc..

From 2019 and 2021, he led a three-year research project on Chinese moving image art at NCAF, curating three research-based exhibitions including “Anti-Projection: Media Sculptures in Early Chinese Video Art”, “Embodied Mirror: Performances in Chinese Video Art”, and “Polyphonic Strategies: The Moving Image and its Expanded Field”.

Dr. Yang is currently planning a research-based curatorial project titled "Who Owns Nature?" at MACA, with completed chapters including “Multispecies Clouds” and "Elemental Constellations." The third chapter, "Gaia should be safe," is scheduled for the end of 2024.

He has also contributed critical essays for catalogues featuring artists such as Laure Prouvost, Omer Fast, Antony Gormley, HO Tzu Nyen, Cao Fei, Wang Tuo, among others. His academic monograph, "Film as Archive," is forthcoming.

Exhibition Photos

Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Julius von Bismarck, Talking to Thunder, 2017, single-channel video, color, sound, 20 min 55 sec. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA - UNNECESSARY DOUBT III, 2024, latex, resin, fluorescent tube, aluminium, 130×85×20 cm. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Chloé Delarue, TAFAA - UNNECESSARY DOUBT II, 2023, latex, resin, neon, aluminium, transformer, 98×97×8 cm. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Kent Chan, Solar Orders, 2023, two-channel video, color, sound, 17 min 41 sec. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Vibeke Mascini, Blind Me, 2022, single-channel video, color, sound, 11 min 21 sec. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Femke Herregraven, Malleable Regress, 2016, original percha gutta Tjipetir slabs, cast polyurethane rubber tiles, acrylic tubes, magnets, photographs, map, dimensions variable. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Josephine Baker, Hydro Electricity: The Overtop, 2023, aluminum, cable fittings, ceramic tiles, crocodile clips, electrical cable, glass, paint, pencil, pigments, plaster, plywood, silicone, 85×157×9 cm. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Josephine Baker, Storm Cycle 02, 2022, cement, chalk, charcoal, glass, lacquer, marker pen, paints, pigments, pine, plaster, plywood, resin, silicone, tiles, timbers, wire, metal, 144.5×84.5×34 cm. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Sonia Levy, Creatures of the Lines, 2024, single-channel 4K video, color, stereo sound, 17 min 14 sec. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Zhuang Hui, Longitude 109.88 Latitude 31.09, 1995, 2008, black and white photo, map, single-channel video, dimensions variable. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Zheng Yuan, Dam the Fool, 2024, single-channel video, color, sound, 32 min. Commissioned by MACA. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

Xi Lei, Two Eels in the Park, 2022, single-channel video, color, sound, found objects (empty fish feed bags, fishing medicine cans and buckets), water pipes, electronic candles, 13 min 55 sec. Gaia Should Be Safe, installation view, MACA, 2024. Photo: Yang Hao

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