The Political Life of Plants

A VIDEO ART WORK IN FIVE CHAPTERS. 1. Six young ​men walk ​into a forest in Taiwan, making close contact with ferns. They establish emotional and physical relationships with the plants, relying on their bodies rather than words. Ferns are very common in Taiwan​. They​ are valued by ​indigenous ​people but not by Japanese colonists​ or the Nationalists​. 2. A man makes love to a bird's nest fern​ and then starts eating it. Zheng reflects on our current moral outlook that it is “natural” to eat plants but “unnatural” to make love to them. Bird's nest fern is a popular delicacy in Taiwan. 3. Zheng collaborates with three local BDSM practitioners who in turn collaborate with three ​fern species​ to expand BDSM practice. 4. For centuries humans have been in love with furled fronds of young ferns. Inspired by Yaoi anime, this chapter follows a young couple in their acts of love with fiddleheads. 5. This chapter connects spores and sperms.

Zheng Bo collaborates with seven Pakistani farmers living and working on a date palm farm outside Dubai to make a dance. The project celebrates the beauty of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) and the skill of these stewards, highlighting intimate relations cultivated over millennia, vital to the economy and culture of the region. Phoenix underscores the contribution of diasporic farmers to regional agriculture, while also drawing attention to the growing phenomenon of climate-induced migration, which in the coming decades is estimated to affect over a billion people, many of them in Asia.

Experimental short by Zheng Bo.

During his extensive visits to different natural habitats around the UAE in the summer of 2022, Zheng Bo was captivated by the umbrella thorn acacia tree, known locally as Samur. For his Artist’s Garden commission at Jameel Arts Centre, Bo choreographed a dance with two human dancers and a Samur tree in the Mleiha desert as a way to understand and reconnect with the land and the tree. The dance pays homage to the tree’s strength and tenacity – the vibrancy of its branches, the delicacy of its leaves, and the defiance of its thorns. The performance is presented at Jameel Arts Centre as a film installation set within a landscape of indigenous plants that thrive in the desert.

Zheng Bo developed the eight-part practice seen in this video to exchange qi, or energy-matter, with the world around us. The movements derive from traditional exercises intended to activate the qi within the human body. Zheng Bo, however, encourages practitioners simultaneously to inhale the fragrances of the surrounding landscape. In so doing, energy-matter begins to flow cyclically among water, earth, plants, and humans.