This book is the result of intellectual and physical journeys that artists, scholars, teachers, and students from China and Germany have undertaken together, in order to gain a better understanding of the connections between old Chinese philosophy (with an emphasis on Daoist writings), traditional Chinese painting, and contemporary art practices.

This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation, which looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history.

By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe—looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North—Decolonizing Nature offers a significant and original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.

Olaf Holzapfel explores the interstices between craft and art, and consequently, between orality and literacy. Much of his work presented in this catalogue—framework installations, hay images, and straw images are displayed in this book—was made together with farmers and craftspeople; by transforming age-old handiwork into contemporary art, Holzapfel unsettles the division between nature and culture, and tradition and modernity.

Addressing possible configurations of art and nature, Margit Busch, recipient of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2016, created a laboratory-cum-experiment that included mealworms and beetles that consume, and thus recycle, polystyrene plastic. By generating insights into the discipline of “transciency,” Busch’s project sheds light on the meeting points of scientific, philosophical, artistic, and practical discourses.