Zhouze Yu

About

This project investigates the inherent contradiction between the autonomy of plants as visual landscapes within urban environments and the pervasive human interventions that shape and constrain them. It adopts the theoretical lens of Object-Oriented Ontology to critically reflect on the phenomenon of “Plant Blindness”— a difference in human concern for the essence and non-human individuals, resulting in the neglect of non-human entities. The project aims to reimagine and improve the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants, to critically examine anthropocentric models of urban landscape design, and ultimately to envision a future grounded in the “multispecies ethnography.”

My practice stems from an ongoing concern with the structural neglect suffered by non-human lifeforms—particularly plants—within urban environments. In highly urbanized spaces, plants are systematically positioned as ornamental presences; their living spaces are fragmented, coded, and constrained, ultimately dissolved into benign and controllable visual symbols. This erasure of plant agency is not a neutral phenomenon but the outcome of institutionalized choices that sustain a narrative of human supremacy, reducing non-human life to passive material and environmental backdrop. By employing the visual metaphors of the “crime scene” and the “crime archive,” I construct a critical archival aesthetic (Foster, 2004) that aims to articulate new narrative logics between humans and non-human species. Urban structures such as tree pits become material evidence of intentions toward domestication and domination, while the city itself is recast as the site of ecological crime. The project thus seeks to deconstruct the default assumptions embedded in our understanding of concepts such as “nature” and “symbiosis,” and to examine how the systematic reconstruction of plant living spaces by humans reflects the underlying tensions between social order and natural order.

The entire project is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman, 2011) and the material turn (Barad, 2003), aiming to transcend the limitations of traditional anthropology that often renders plants as “unspeakable Others.” I regard plants as agents endowed with autonomous life and ecological agency, whose existence should not be reduced to the functional role of “urban landscape.” Donna Haraway’s notion of “staying with the trouble” (2016) serves as a crucial conceptual reference for my practice. It proposes that art should no longer evade ecological crises, but instead entangle with them, cohabit alongside them, and engage in critical reflection.