Content Amber in Flux: Art and Anthropological Fieldwork themed sharing session.

Speakers

Zheng Yayi

Postdoctoral Researcher, Project “Amber Worlds: Thinking the Anthropocene through Geological Anthropology”, University of Oslo, Norway. Zheng Yayi’s primary field‑research site is Fushun. She explores social, economic and ecological transformations from the perspective of amber. Her research interests include environmental anthropology and multispecies studies. Previously, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Borana region of Ethiopia, examining multispecies relations among local pastoralists, and how these relations intersect with economic development and ecological environments.

Laur Kiik

Postdoctoral Researcher, Project “Amber Worlds: Thinking the Anthropocene through Geological Anthropology”, University of Oslo, Norway. Since 2010, Laur Kiik has carried out ethnographic research on the Kachin people across the Myanmar‑India‑China borderlands. His research themes cover nationalism, natural resources, wildlife conservation and war. The territories inhabited by the Kachin people have endured decades of military dictatorship, armed nationalist insurgency, and large‑scale resource extraction. Within this context, amber from Kachin State forms part of a broader economic system: multi‑billion‑dollar jade mining and trade, deforestation of primary rainforests, monoculture plantations, opium and drug trafficking, gold and rare‑earth mining, and a stalled large‑scale hydropower megaproject. These ambers sometimes preserve fossil remains of insects, lizards, small dinosaurs, flowers and other organisms dating back 100 million years. Scientists in China and elsewhere study these specimens to understand the evolution of life on Earth. Laur’s research demonstrates that nationalism is deeply entangled with nature and cannot be understood in isolation.

Li Yong

Artist, lives in Fushun. Li Yong works across media including, but not limited to, photography, video, writing and installation. He was nominated for the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2010 and received the TOP20 New Talent of Chinese Contemporary Photography award in 2015. Recent Exhibitions include: Relating Topography: Images, Fieldwork and the Poetics of Geography (Guangdong Times Museum, 2024; Fotografiska Shanghai, 2025); Changbai Spring 2025 Residency Project (Northeast Asia Art Archive, 2025); Solid Sediment: Archives of Minerals (CAFA Art Museum, 2024); Fossil Sunshine, Sedimented Bodies – collaborative art project by Yu Miao & Li Yong (Goethe‑Institut Beijing, 2024); Unfinished, Chengdu International Photography Week (Chengdu Art Museum, 2024); In 2020, Chinese Contemporary Photography Catalogue‑Li Yong was published by Zhejiang Photography Publishing House. Li Yong has long worked within several post‑industrial energy landscapes shaped by a century of “excavation”. As an inseparable temporal‑spatial material within Li Yong’s artistic practice, amber serves as a co‑present medium connecting shifting historical interfaces.