The Virtual Grass is always Greener—Nature in Contemporary Media Art from the Sinophone Region

Artists working mainly with computer generated images (CGI) and art works that come to life in the virtual realm could just let go of nature entirely, they could envision a place without grass, wind, water, oceans, and flowers; without lions, ants, and fungi to cultivate the soil. Where can trees grow roots in the virtual world, anyway? But instead of deleting nature from the virtual, artists are using digital imagery to discuss and envision new forms of cohabitation and entangled shared spaces, between humans, flora, fauna, and technology. The virtual is inhabited by hybrid creatures, images of animals, flowing meadows, and sparkling clear waterfalls. This essay will look at artworks by leading multimedia artists from the Sinophone region who depict and think about nature in their respective artistic practice. By using digital techniques to elaborate their ideas, they embody the “post-nostalgic concept of nature and natural beauty, in which nature and technology are no longer seen as opposing categories, but rather as poles that are intertwined in an ongoing process of coevolution (Jos de Mul, 2017).” To accentuate the impulses art can and does give in times of planetary crisis, I will focus on a selected group of media artists from China, Hongkong, Taiwan, and the Chinese speaking diaspora, who are equally vocal and visible in domestic and global art contexts. This transcultural position of the artworks and the artists themselves offers crucial connection points to the tentatively formulated Sinophonecene (Hai Ren, Zheng Bo and Wu Mali, 2022), which asks for a locally embedded response to planetary questions emerging from the Sinophone region (Shu-Mei Shih, 2011). This paper will look at video works by LuYang (陸揚, b. 1984), Lawrence Lek (陆明龙, b. 1982), Vvzela Kook (曲淵澈, b. 1990), Tang Han (唐菡, b. 1989), and Su Yu Hsin (蘇郁心, b.1989) produced between 2019 and 2023 to discuss artistic approaches toward nature in the virtual world. The analysis follows a dynamic development from art works solely using CGI techniques to artworks that mix CGI with real physical nature captured on film and videos that use filmed physical nature only. I am using this dynamic approach to exemplify the shift in visual language that arguably brings along an emotive shift in the viewers’ perception. I will argue that nature in the virtual realm is not only an aesthetic category or viewed as a resource problem in terms of climate crisis, but instead it shows itself as a profound human need to surround oneself with nature, thus presenting nature as an ontological necessity to be in the world, be it physical or virtual. Furthermore, I argue that the analyzed artworks help to “prevent plant blindness” (James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, 1998) through different techniques, and within technically produced surroundings.