Zheng Bo's exhibition at Kiang Malingue critiques eco-porn and interspecies narratives

Zheng Bo's recent exhibition at Kiang Malingue in New York, titled 'Vibrancy, Vibrancy, Vibrancy', ran from 19 September to 1 November, featuring works that explore nonhuman ecosystems and erotic interspecies relations. The show included a 15-minute video, The Political Life of a Coral Lagoon 1 (2025), which uses underwater footage from the Poé Lagoon off New Caledonia in the South Pacific, overlaying cartoonish speech bubbles on aquatic creatures to present an ecosystem as a model society. This video, scripted with ChatGPT, was criticized for flattening complex ecological interactions into simplistic moral narratives. Another video, Le Sacre du printemps (2021–22), depicts nude dancers in a forest engaging in erotic, spiritual exercises with trees, described in the press release as channeling 'collective ecosexual desire'. Zheng Bo has expressed interest in 'eco-porn', citing research on fern sexuality, but the choreography in this work was seen as lacking inspiration from plant mechanics. In contrast, pencil drawings displayed on low wood platforms, sketching flora near the artist's home on Lantau Island in Hong Kong, were praised for their genuine, non-narrative focus on nonhuman subjects. The review, from the Winter 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia, highlights a disconnect between Zheng Bo's theoretical interests and the execution of the video works, which were perceived as heavy-handed and infantilizing.