Zheng Bo’s “Survival Manual I”

In advance of my presentation tomorrow, I just want to share this work by the artist Zheng Bo.

The work is titled Survival Manual I (Hand-Copied 1961 “Shanghai’s Wild Edible Plants”), and consists of 72 pages of drawings and hand-written text bound in a book. “Shanghai’s Wild Edible Plants” was an encyclopedia of local, edible plants originally published by the Communist Party in 1961 during the famine caused by regulations during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Zheng copied the book by hand, including the illustrations, and renamed it “Survival Manual,” emphasizing the book’s use and undermining the original euphemistic title. The piece also emphasizes a theme Zheng has worked with throughout his practice: the politicization of plants.

Survival Manual reminded me of Kimmerer’s story in Braiding Sweetgrass (Wal-marsh, if you recall). I think Kimmerer’s orientation to plants could also be political, even though she speaks about them in such an individualized way. I’m thinking of that line from her first camping trip with a group of university students. Lying on the forest floor, she thinks how bored her students seem, and how, even though she doubts they will remember what she tells them about the spiders she notices, she feels a responsibility to the forest “I had to speak up for the spiders.” In Zheng’s work, other living organisms, especially plants, have a great capacity to speak to marginalization, queerness and, by extension, the political. To speak on behalf of those whose voices are not heard like the plants, like weeds, is important in understanding ourselves as inherently akin to the natural world, but also perhaps in having compassion for that which seems so unlike us.

You can view Survival Manual I and other works by Zheng Bo here: http://zhengbo.org/2015_SM1.html

My prez and bib can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13v7saL6z6YAR9wjlDZMB-x7Zym6CA8Z3tnUaQu0n-3M/edit?usp=sharing