The University of Chicago Center in Beijing is open Monday-Friday from 9am to 6pm excepting major holidays. Please visit the exhibition for free during the opening hours.
If you have any questions, contact us at beijingcenter@uchicago.edu.
The exhibition Rewriting Natural History originates from reflections on the meanings of “nature” and “history” as well as the relationship between them in the age of artificial intelligence. It constitutes a continuation and further development of the homonymous exhibition held last autumn. Since the publication of Naturalis Historia, the seminal work by Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) of Ancient Rome, humanity has endeavoured to document “nature”. Yet nature is never purely external and objective. Chinese garden art has long upheld the maxim: “Where truth exists, craft arises; through craft, truth is brought forth” (Ji Cheng, Yuanye · Piling [Rock Piling]). Building upon Pliny the Elder’s ideas, the Chicago School drew on ecological research into the succession of biological communities. Its scholars conceived cities, neighbourhoods, social groups and social issues as organically evolving spontaneous processes, and traced their full life cycles. The Chicago School argued that social processes share parallels with natural evolution.
Against this backdrop, this compact yet refined exhibition invites artists to draw imagery from nature and re-present nature through their works. Meanwhile, participating scientific researchers engage in dialogue with the artists, seeking to jointly “rewrite” (reimagine) a fragment of a “natural history”. The gradual formation of the exhibition is itself part of its content. Furthermore, the exhibited works and the contexts inhabited by participants collectively form a situational logic. Attention to and interpretation of the questions sparked by the exhibition will continuously reshape the exhibition entitled Natural History.
Accordingly, the exhibition itself will undergo constant transformations throughout its run, enriching itself toward more open-ended interpretations. Just as last autumn, we continue to invite visitors to participate in this cultural and social experiment. Emerging in the form of an art exhibition, visitors are encouraged to constructively intervene in the exhibition under the overarching premise of symbiosis with it. This phenomenon also serves as a metaphor for humanity’s active intervention and substantive transformation of various seemingly “natural” systems.