We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ruoyu (Sophie) Zhang. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ruoyu (Sophie) below.
Ruoyu (Sophie), looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story, and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
Every discipline involves napa cabbage; as a way to contextualize my work, it goes beyond just the organic material of napa cabbage and extends into a shift towards posthumanism. My body aesthetics and image politics follow a drama of the new communication revolution, a posthuman narrative based on the transformations of the human, non-human, nature, and technology. Napa cabbage serves as a diffractive apparatus to encode and decode concepts and objects “through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge.” As Karen Barad responded to Haraway’s diffractive approach, “to think about the natural and the cultural together, without ‘holding either nature or culture as the fixed reference for understanding the other,’ we need a diffractive apparatus.”
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
In the context of the posthuman society, I predominantly focus on ecocriticism and the concept of ‘ecologies of coexistence’ as expressed in anemic art/poetry. Working as a ‘diffraction apparatus,’ my practice employs multiple mediums and natural objects (such as napa cabbage, wine, coffee, etc.), oil painting, printmaking, sound, and performance to install my ideas within the same spectrum, creating interdependent poetic scores. My works respond to, or reinterpret, natural objects that exist on the threshold of subjectivity, the recognizable, and the representable. The accomplishment of ‘words,’ ‘scores,’ in symbiosis with humans, nature, and autonomous (asemic) poetics adds new perspectives to art by incorporating concepts from material ecocriticism and post-nature.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment, and often, it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
All these cultural, literary, and art productions do not emerge in a void but as a result of our natural evolution in this posthuman world. In the 2019 La Biennale di Venezia, the ‘Cosmo Eggs’ project developed Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies into three ‘ecologies of coexistence’ and questioned their possibility for aesthetic unification:
- The environmental ecology becomes ‘an ecology of coexistence between humans and non-humans.’
- The social ecology becomes ‘an ecology of coexistence of different cultures, civilizations, and historical perceptions.’
- The mental ecology becomes ‘an ecology of coexistence of different perspectives (views, rules, opinions, expressions).’
My advice to others is to foster curiosity, explore the intersection of nature and culture, and engage with new or diverse artistic media.
Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
I’m not from an artistic family. Despite my parents’ disapproval, I decided to pursue a degree in fine arts. Despite their lack of guidance, I developed the ability to think and research independently. My personality was shaped by the years I spent in my hometown, which strengthened my connection to napa cabbage. Consuming napa cabbage, which has become a divine object in my life, is essential to my daily rituals. In South Asia, napa cabbage has many symbolic meanings and homonym transcriptions, such as wealth and purity. Available napa cabbage is simultaneously a product of nature and the contemporary consumer society. Currently, napa cabbage holds a significant place as one of the primary objects, materials, and scores in my artistic works.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @almightysophie
