North x Anthropocene: Ecological Sensibilities from the Edges is a long-term research-based curatorial project. Originating from Northeast China, it adopts a transnational perspective to examine the entanglements among environmental history, geopolitics, ecological thought, and technology in Northeast Eurasia. The project explores alternative modes of ecological perception, distills the ecological wisdom of cross-species alliances, and seeks to infuse existing political ecology with local experiences and critical perspectives from Northeast Eurasia.

The Discovery of Daqing: Resources, Petroleumscape and Urbanization

Oil has been central to national security, prosperity, and influenced the very nature of global power structure, consumption patterns and evolving landscape since the 20th century. In Western societies, it represents a bourgeoisie way of life; in developing countries, it is a curse sometimes. The discovery of Daqing Oil Field is a microcosm of China's nation-building and turbulent modernization process around production and consumption of oil resources in the 20th century; the petroleum-landscape, under the influence of the Daqing model, reflects the strategic changes of the consumption of national land, space and natural resources, as well as the constraints brought by those resources in defining urbanization patterns. Humanity achieves their survival and development through exploiting the earth resources, while left indelible marks on the planet. The story on the discovery of Daqing is the manifestation of such dynamic relationship.

Speaker Li Hou

Li Hou is Professor of Urban Planning at Tongji University. She graduated from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University with a Master of Design Studies in 2005 and a Doctor of Design in 2009. Prior to that, she received a Master of Urban Planning and B.Eng from Tongji University. Her scholarship addresses issues on the history of urban and regional planning in modern China with a particular attention to the relationship of industrialization and urbanization, of the urban-rural divide, as well as the transnational travelling of planning ideas and techniques. Her recent publications include Richard Paulick in Shanghai, 1933-1949: The Postwar Planning and Reconstruction of a Modern Chinese Metropolis (Shanghai: Tongji University Press, 2016), “Six Decades of Planning Education in China: Those Planned and Unplanned”, in Andrea Frank & Christopher Silver (eds.), Urban Planning Education: Beginnings, Global Movement and Future Prospects, Springer, 2017, and Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State, Harvard University Press, 2018.

Convener & Speaker Mia Yu

Mia Yu is a Beijing-based art historian and curator. She has received numerous awards and fellowships for her art writing and curatorial practice, including China Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) Art Critic Award, the Yishu Award for Critical Writing, Tate Asia Research Fellowship, and she was nominated for 2020 Art Awards of China (AAC) Curator of the Year Award. She serves on the jury committees of Hyundai Blue Prize, Art 021 x Porsche Art Award and Art Nova. Mia Yu has curated numerous exhibitions including Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in 2020 and the OCAT Biennale in 2021. She co-wrote the book Uncooperative Contemporaries: Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000 which was published by Afterall Exhibition Histories series. She teaches at the International MFA at China Academy of Art.

Respondents Liu Xin, Zhang Yibei

LIU Xin is an artist and engineer, the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab, a member of the inaugural ONX studio program founded by New Museum and Onassis NY. She holds a faculty position at Strelka Inistitue's Terraforming program. Her recent research and interest center around the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations and cosmic metabolism. She has received the X-Museum Triennial Award, inaugural Europe ARTificial Intelligence Lab residency with Ars Electronica and the SXSW Interactive Innovation Award.

ZHANG Yibei（b.1992, born in Heilongjiang, China) lives and works in Beijing. She graduated from the Royal College of Art with a Master's degree in Sculpture in 2017, graduated from the University of the Arts London with a Bachelor's degree in Sculpture in 2015. Her art works focus on materials, which is a rethinking of the relationship between artist, material and ideation. She received the 7th Contemporary Sculpture Award in 2019 and has recently participated in exhibitions at the Yinchuan Contemporary Art Museum, Today Art Museum and Goethe Institute.