The Zhouqian Art Community – How will we live together?

In late August 2024, I had the privilege of witnessing, and to a certain degree par cipa ng in, the last week leading up to the opening of the Zhouqian Art Community (ZAC), located in Zhouqian Village, Shixing County, Guangdong Province. Being positioned somewhere between observer and participant, not quite outsider but not insider either, and with limited abilities to communicate, this text does not a empt to explain or recapitulate what the ZAC is according to its founders, in particular professor Qu Yan, Dean of Institute of Rural and construction at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Rather, what I offer in the following is a (Western) perspective, connecting the ZAC to my own influences and research interests in art, architecture, urbanism and theory. 

Rural Reconstruction Let us take a moment to reflect on the notion of Rural Reconstruction. It does not exist in the West, not to the same extend anyway, and a comparative approach could work out in detail the conditions there, but this is beyond the limited scope of this article. We might define rural reconstruction as a response to modernization and industrialization in China going back about 150 years to the middle of the 19th century. We might further define modernization as the universalization of European Modernity, that is, a process of global homogenization, or globalization. Modernization in China is a complex topic that, likewise, this short essay can do no justice to. Its complexity is mirrored in the intricate history of China in the 20th century and it is a socialist as much as a capitalist modernization, perhaps something that goes beyond this duality altogether. 

Be that as it may, one might propose that rural reconstruction looks at this history through a lens that attempts to identify possible trajectories of history outside of modernization, what the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has called extra-modern, and the destruction and loss it has caused to the countryside. The profundity of the topic becomes obvious when we recall that Liang Shuming, a seminal figure in the history of rural reconstruction, referred to the village as the foundation and the center of Chinese society in his book Rural Reconstruction Theory (1932-1936), formerly, and significantly, The Future of the Chinese Nation. 

With its deep roots in agriculture, thus, the rural, and its reconstruction, have a particular meaning within Chinese culture and the concept cannot be applied outside of it without specific contextualization. This spatialization of the rural has a temporal dimension in light of reconstruction, repair and regeneration, all of which point towards a common orientation without being identical. What is important here is that we should not think of reconstruction as a reinstantiation of the past. The way I propose to approach it is in light of the question: What would have been possible? What are the alternative histories that have unfolded virtually and how can they be actualized? We thus avoid a discourse that becomes centered around the past, rather we actively remain in the here and now. 

Entirely Relational The Zhouqian Art Community implies a significant statement in its title: It is not a place for art, rather it is art. This entirely relational approach to art coincides with a broader relational conception of architecture, urbanism and design, all of which produce relationships, that is, ways of life. A proper and more knowledgeable approach would ground the ZAC in Chinese philosophy. For me, the intuitive way to grasp it is as pure relationality, in reference to the philosopher William James’ concept of pure experience. which we might, in turn, relate to individuation and becoming, the flow of life. This relationality is expressed beautifully in the graphic design created for the ZAC (Fig.1): We see a design based on a Chinese folk art drawing where people, in this case largely men, seem to work the fields along with tools and animals. What is so striking about this design is the way that all of them merge into one continuous pattern, humans, animals and technological objects, all in light of the evolution of plants, one would assume. 

Fig.1：Zhouqian Art Community Graphic design

Acting in Light of an Evolution  The computational biologist Mike Levin, who works on regenerative medicine and novel, hybrid and synthetic organisms, refers to regeneration as a process facilitated through collective and diverse intelligences. I use in my research the concept of acting in light of an evolution. This is exactly what we are seeing in the graphic design of the ZAC, and it is exactly, I argue, what the ZAC produces: it allows those that participate in it, the local people, children, adolescents, students, teachers, scholars, 

artists, practitioners and people from all kinds of backgrounds, to actualize and evolve together, within a specific place, a specific history, a specific culture, or multiplicities thereof. 

It is this question that the curator and architect Hashim Sarkis chose as the title for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale: How will we live together? What Sarkis is addressing here, in short, is coexistence. It is, I argue, a profound and urgent question of planetary significance that specifically creative practices are asked to address. For me, the ZAC is precisely this, an active system that allows for the collective negotiation of coexistence and the related questions thereof.  

Embodied Cognition＆Technology There are two main points that, at this time and from my perspective, remain open: I believe strongly that the question of coexistence is essentially a question concerning embodied cognition, not species. One might say, it is a question concerning diverse, novel and unconventional manifestations of intelligence. I would argue that the rural is precisely where such intelligences meet. But how is the ZAC going to address this question of multispecies coexistence, if at all it intends to do so? 

Secondly, and strongly related, is the question concerning technology, specifically digital and computational media up to artificial intelligence. We can trace the dynamic of organism and machine back to the profound graphic design of the ZAC. But, in light of this, how do we think the future of nature and technology, of humans and machines? How do we think beyond the perhaps misguided notion that technology is a threat to rural harmony, since such a notion might be founded on a narrow anthropocentric concept of the rural in the 

first place. In reconstruction and regeneration, we are actualizing the future, we are not returning to the past. A multispecies perspective and the integration of technology might help us in expanding the rural towards its blurring with the urban, and it might, in turn, transform our cities. 

The creation of the ZAC, a place for ideas and a laboratory of life, embedded and rooted in the local context, is a veritable achievement. It has been profoundly rewarding to be a part of its opening to the local community.