Plants, knowledge, and contemporary arts in East and Southeast Asia

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

The interdependencies between plants, ethics and knowledge within contemporary arts in East and Southeast Asia are more intricate than is recognized. Many plants hold medical, material and symbolic value, conveying both explicit and implicit knowledge about the crucial role of vegetation in shaping cultures and societies across history and into the present. In addition, plants continue to bear witness to past and ongoing ethical and ecological violations. These both historical and contemporary forms of botanical material conditions—and their agency in mediating knowledge—are actively explored by artists. Such interdependencies extend beyond the frameworks of posthumanism, new materialism, and antagonistic art activism. Drawing on East and Southeast Asian perspectives in ecocritical art history, critical plant studies, and environmental histories, this research problematizes the predominantly Euro-American framing of the recent ‘botanical turn’ in contemporary art studies. With an intermedium approach that examines both tangible and intangible artworks and taking plant-bound artistic practices as an environmental lens, this study situates close analyses of selected artistic practices within broader environmental histories and ecological contexts. By foregrounding the diverse relations between arts and plants, I conceptualize plants simultaneously as material, medium, method and active agent in contemporary arts. Through a theoretical framework of botanical proximities, this research identifies the practices, strategies, and collaborations employed to redefine the coexistence of arts, botany and humans. As artists reconfigure eco-social patterns intertwined with plants and their associated forms of (counter)knowledge, these practices raise profound ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, ethical, and religious questions on the role of plant-bound art. In doing so they offer new insights into ecological, cultural, communal, and planetary (un)sustainabilities.