Introduction: Tracing Environmental and Cohabitational Perspectives in Chinese Art and Querying the Sinophonecene

The introduction describes the edited volume as providing a multi-vocal, case-study based analysis that critically questions the Anthropocene, its potential relevance, and how it relates to a particular region, namely China. It does so with a deliberate focus on contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, while building on, but also problematizing and complicating existing discussions on both concepts in the fields of art and visual culture. Probing the methodological potential of the “Sinophonecene”, a recently suggested concept, the volume aims to contribute to a more “situated” or “worlded” understanding of particular aesthetic/artistic practices, curatorial positions, and their epistemological and ontological challenges, as they address planetary, interspecies, and (co)habitational questions fractured throughout the Sinophone world. The author emphasizes that neither these practices nor their curatorial framings and the ensuing academic reflections essentialize Chineseness. Rather, they critically question and undermine the discursive as well as institutionalized power of nationalist, regionalist or civilizational framings in the arts, while engaging with, and performing various notions of the planetary. Consequently, the case studies allow the eponymous “tracing” of transnational and transcultural entanglements across several empirical and epistemic scales, and related visual geographies, when following the interaction of diverse agents, including non-human entities, such as plants, animals and technoid beings. Arguably, these agents co-constitute the “Sinophonecene” as inhabitants of the greater Chinese region and are – more often than not – dynamically transgressing, and challenging its multiple borders. The introduction also outlines the tetrapartite structure of the book, beginning with six case studies by seven authors (“seeds”), followed by an intermezzo that traces premodern philosophical and cosmological understandings of the relation between man and nature in contemporary artistic practices (“branching out”), leading to the third section of four conversations with junior and senior curators in the field (“saplings”), which is concluded by the three editors shared reflections (“composting”) on preliminary learnings and ensuing questions.