Asia Art Archive welcomes Zheng Bo to our Residency Programme. Zheng Bo is an artist, writer, and educator with a focus on ecologically-engaged art. Using plants, Zheng explores political histories, archives, and knowledge systems.
During his residency, Zheng investigates ways to approach archive collections and practices from an ecological perspective. How do we interpret archives as cycles of knowledge—what is produced, wasted, and composted? How can publics inhabit an archive rather than extract from it? Zheng will organise workshops and panel discussions with botanists and ecologists to examine the above questions. He will also stage site-specific interventions in AAA’s library space.
Zheng Bo lives and works in Hong Kong. He currently teaches at City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media. He has worked with museums and art spaces in Asia and Europe, including Hong Kong Museum of Art, Times Museum in Guangzhou, Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai, Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, TheCube Project Space in Taipei, and Villa Vassilieff in Paris.
This residency is part of Who Owns It?, a series that considers users as active participants with the agency to change institutions. How do people build a sense of ownership or community around a common aspiration? What unites a seed collector and museum curator, or a refugee camp and an impermanent shrine? AAA asks artists, architects, farmers, and scholars to reflect on users that produce, collect, build, and destroy.
Zheng’s residency is a programme under The Ha Bik Chuen Archive Project (2016–19), generously supported by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust.