Reading 07
Li Shan
李山
Production date
2007
Object Detail
Media
acrylic on canvas
Measurements
269 x 175 cm
Notes
The ‘Reading’ series, large-scale expressive paintings of animals covered in dragonflies, butterflies or other creatures, are a further development of Li Shan’s immersion in biology, and his interest in interspecies genetic combinations. In 1998 Li had proposed the creation of a living artwork, but was, perhaps unsurprisingly, unable to find a scientist to work with him on creating a new species. In 2007, however, he persuaded an expert at the Shanghai Agricultural Science Laboratory to enter into a collaboration, and was able finally to exhibit the Pumpkin Project, together with Zhang Pingjie, a critic who had published a thesis focused on BioArt in 2002. Li and Zhang had been involved in conversations about such a project for more than ten years. With the assistance and advice of vegetable breeding experts, they turned their fantasy of creating a new life form into reality, creating a strange new pumpkin using genovariation and gene recombination technologies, raising the difficult ethical questions of where such interventions should end, and how they should be controlled. What are the appropriate boundaries between one specific organism and others?
Accession number
2017.094