Liang Shaoji's Silkworm Art as Rituals of "Ziran": Agency and Techniques

Abstract

Chinese contemporary artist Liang Shaoji has collaborated with living domestic silkworms for thirty years to create artworks acclaimed worldwide for manifesting the Daoism-influenced ecological motif ‘ziran’. This dissertation examines the material composition and symbolic articulation of ‘ziran’ (nature, spontaneity, the way as it is, non-assertiveness etc.) in Liang’s oeuvre from an anthropological perspective, a multivocal concept often misunderstood or oversimplified by art critics as Eastern egalitarian cosmology of nature or a less-manipulative approach to nonhumans. Based on my multi-species, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in China during 2018-2019, this research demonstrates that Liang’s artistic techniques feature intense collaboration with silkworm farmers and biologists and possess a paradoxical state between assertive manipulation and reflective intervention. The dissertation analyses Liang’s art series as durational ritual events by mainly drawing on Gell’s art nexus framework on agency and Turner’s ritual theory on liminality. Broadly contextualised in Chinese silkworm husbandry and silk culture, the study shows that silkworms as agentive performers and silk as a material-spiritual medium jointly dictate the efficacy of Liang’s ritual artworks during his ‘making-in-cultivating’ art practice, rather than roughly standing for nature as the antithesis of industrialization. The thesis concludes that the artist has explored the ambivalence of ‘ziran’ by generating anti-structural liminalities namely between industrialization and premodernity, materiality and spirituality, organism and thing, artificiality and naturalness, instead of conservatively representing Daoist principles. This project experiments with ethnography as a new genre of art criticism.

Date of Award	16 Dec 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Bo ZHENG (Supervisor)