Building on my own fieldwork experience, this article situates the artists’ practices within three analytical frameworks: imagination and narrative, wholeness and fragmentation, and remoteness and closeness. It explores how their embodied experience and creative reflections in the field generate new knowledge, ¹paying particular attention to the ways in which these women artists use artistic practice to rethink the human–nature relationship in the face of environmental change. In doing so, it offers new perspectives and inspirations for both theoretical inquiry and practical exploration in contemporary art and field-based research.

In the year before the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, before the profound ecological transformations of the Yangtze River basin, I accompanied my mother on a journey upriver from Tongling, bidding a long farewell to the landscape soon to be submerged forever beneath the water. Old men selling corn along the banks near Gezhouba, fellow travelers chatting by the boat’s railing, and the legends of the now vanished Fengdu dock remain vivid in my memory. Carried by the river’s vast current, these scenes have shaped not only how I experience the world, but also compelled me to anchor my imagination of the world in the body, the land, and situated experience. When my own work intersects with the practices of these artists, I observe a transformative mechanism between imagination and experience. Imagination does not stand in opposition to reality; rather, it becomes a means of entering into it. Embodied perception also provides the basis for reconstructing narrative. This dynamic is particularly prominent in the works of Liu Yujia and He Zike.

Liu’s field practice compellingly demonstrates this transformation from imagination to experience. Filming while on the road, she sets out without a script or prior research, choosing instead to “open all senses unreservedly and embrace a journey full of uncertainty.” ¹ In her 2023 film A Darkness Shimmering in the Light, she ventured deep into the remote northeastern borderlands of China, traversing regions inhabited by various ethnic groups. Working across multiple media, including 16mm film, digital video, and drone footage, she captures fleeting scenes of subsistence practices such as logging, hunting, ginseng gathering, and fishing. Transcending technological and cultural boundaries, her approach to filmmaking departs from traditional documentary narratives and brings together ethnography, literary imagination, and video art. In the end, she presents a forest ecology where humans, spirits, animals, and plants coexist. It manifests the ecological transformations of this ancient forest under industrialization, and the subtle shifts in human–nature relationships.

While Liu reimagines natural space through bodily openness in her practice, He’s Random Access (2023) constructs a hybrid narrative that moves from technological fantasy to geological storytelling. Developed as part of Under the Cloud, a project she co-initiated with curator Iris Long, the work envisions a chaotic aftermath following the collapse of an urban data center, transforming a digital crisis into a site where human and geological memory intersect. ¹ He acutely reinterprets the material infrastructure of the data center, such as servers, indicator lights, and temperature-controlled rooms, as geological strata embedded with collective memory. Such imaginative capacity reflects the artist’s distinctive narrative strategy in technological environments. Rather than simply critiquing or celebrating technology, she redefines the relationship between technology and nature through embodied perception. As she puts it, “The world is one vast data center.” This perspective reconfigures our understanding of urban space and reveals the underlying structures of human existence in the digital age. ²

The fieldwork of these two artists is never merely documentation. Instead, they imaginatively reweave fragmented field experiences into emotionally resonant narratives. Their bodies serve not only as cognitive instruments but also as sources of imagination, attuned to subtle connections often missed by rational analysis. In the transformation from fieldwork to artistic work, imagination and reality, the personal and the collective, the past and the present, are all recomposed through embodied perception, giving rise to storytelling that is at once intimate and public.

In the summer of 2025, I returned to the Yangtze River and its tributaries, residing in a mountain house along the South Divine Path of Wudang Mountains. Amid the sweltering heat, I gazed up at the starry sky, watching scattered points of light dart across the brilliant constellations. At times they converged, at times they dispersed, mysteriously traversing the night. A faint glimmer suddenly flickered before my eyes. They were fireflies shimmering in the dog days of summer, like stars fallen to the ground. The glow of the fireflies immediately in front of me and the distant starlight above mirrored each other, linking fleeting flashes with the vastness of the world. This field experience brought to mind the practices of Zhang Wenxin and Chen Xiaoyi. Neither settles for superficial observations of isolated phenomena or singular issues; both always pursue lines of inquiry in depth, putting scattered fragments into a coherent intellectual realm. Their works resemble the stars in the night sky. While each point appears separate, together they form the larger cosmos.

Zhang’s practice fully embraces the mode of cognition that moves from fragmentation to wholeness. She enters caves and wilderness, joins explorers and scientists, and obsessively returns to the field time and again. She continually expands the sensory capacities of her body and pushes her thinking into deep time, in an effort to articulate “human and nonhuman intelligence.” ¹ In Topology of Caves and Bodies (2014–), Zhang treats the cave as a topological landscape that connects the body to geological history. From prehistoric murals to images of black holes, and from the Peach Blossom Spring to apocalyptic bunkers, these seemingly disparate experiences are woven into a holistic narrative that reveals how caves have shaped human cognition and history from below. Zhang’s exploration points to the potential of subterranean space as refuge in an age of climate crisis, prompting reflection on the cave ecosystem as shelter amid environmental catastrophe. Her field practice is not one of passive recording, but of active wandering through forests and caverns in search of lived experiences folded into history. As she states, “A human cannot turn into stone or wood. Our flesh is soft and fragile. But when the world around us collapses again and again, it is memory that leads us away from death. Through time’s cold ashes we walk with all beings, slipping into countless withered bodies, awaiting in the caves the return of the wind that brings rebirth.” ²

Chen’s field practice demonstrates her remarkable ability to connect disparate times and spaces. She traces deep correspondences across geographically and culturally fragmented encounters. In 2023, guided by clues of white conches, she traveled to Lhasa, where she discovered ladder-like patterns etched into rock. This finding became a key image in her 2024 film The Visions of Karma. The discovery also reactivated her memory from 2013, when she had seen a similar ladder motif painted some 8,000 years ago by the Ngarluma people in a cave on an island off the coast of Australia. Separated by millennia and continents, these fragments of civilization enter into a striking resonance. Her fieldwork transcends geographic boundaries in search of common ground in the nature of life, examining “the language beneath language, and the world beneath appearances.” She explores how global climate change affects distant yet interconnected ecosystems, from melting glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau to coral bleaching on Australian reefs. Environmental transformation emerges as a hidden thread linking ancient and contemporary civilizations. ¹ Based on her many field expeditions, she reflects on the purpose of artistic creation: “To give form to the time of my life through the objects I encounter, so they may share life with me and be reborn into the world.” ² By integrating personal experience and the wisdom of ancient cultures, her fieldwork becomes a profound form of spatiotemporal archaeology, enabling her to reconstruct a spiritual map from small pieces.

In the lived experiences of Zhang and Chen, the field is never just a physical space. It is also a site where emotions and memories converge. Using their body as a medium, they weave personal experience together with environmental changes and respond to the field’s persistent call. Each fleeting glimmer captured by the artists in the field illuminates the universe like a firefly lighting up the night sky. Their practices offer some of the most acute and profound responses to our times, through the interplay of fragmentation and wholeness, and of individual experience and universal narrative.

After my stay in the Wudang Mountains, I joined several artists on a four-day field trip to Zhoushan, investigating the region’s colonial history, modern infrastructure development, and current environmental concerns. We encountered both the fragility and resilience of the island ecosystem, marked by wounds of colonial history, the environmental impact of port construction, and the combined challenges of marine pollution and climate change today. Through such field experiences, I have become increasingly aware that women artists’ environmental sensitivity is not incidental. Their bodily experiences and modes of perception directly address the most overlooked dimensions of the ecological crisis: the emotional, poetic, and holistic forms of ecological wisdom.

Han Qian’s Stillness Between Two Waves of the Sea (2022) exemplifies a field-based practice rooted in the archaeologies of memory. Her nomadic working method led her to make repeated visits to the mines and industrial ruins of Hebei Province. Her embodied engagement transformed geographical remoteness into an emotionally intimate landscape of memory. Seen through her lens, Hebei’s mines are not only geological sites, but layered terrains of memory that carry the histories of three generations of her family. By tracing her family lineage, Han maps the trajectory of China’s steel industry as it migrated from north to south in the twentieth century, precisely locating the intersection of personal fate and historical transformation on this seemingly desolate land. In her video, the post-industrial ruins of abandoned mining sites cohabitate with natural life, witnessing the earth’s regeneration amid historical trauma. Through embodied perception, she reconfigures the linear progression of history into a cyclical ecological rhythm. Crucially, she refuses to reduce the field to a site of data collection. She opens her body as a sensing medium that connects past and present, as well as the personal and the collective. As she remarks, when we attempt to understand things that are “incoherent,” “history and memory often lead us toward older, more complex worlds.” ¹

Xiaoxiao Xu’s Watering My Horse by a Spring at the Foot of the Long Wall further enriches our understanding of the relationship between the remote and the nearby. Following the lives of people living at the foot of the Great Wall, she undertook a 25,000-kilometer road trip, making what is often perceived as a distant historical monument into a personal field experience. Contrary to popular imagination, the Great Wall is not a single, continuous structure, but a collection of walls and watchtowers built across various dynasties. Over the course of her journey, Xu did more than investigating historical sites; she also observed diverse ecological transformations along the Wall. Whether concerning the threats of desertification or efforts at vegetation restoration, environmental and cultural heritage protection intersect in complex ways. By grounding this grand historical narrative in lived, geographical experiences, Xu demonstrates how women artists, by means of long-distance field crossings, can reactivate spatial memories obscured by modernization.

The practices of Han and Xu show that remoteness has never been a mere geographical concept. It often refers to experiential spaces that have been forgotten or marginalized by dominant narratives. Likewise, closeness is not defined solely by physical proximity, but by the depth of connection forged through bodily perception and emotional engagement. In their fieldwork, the distant and the nearby, the ancient and the contemporary, and the personal and the historical are reconfigured through women’s distinctive perceptual frameworks. They formulate spatial narratives that are at once critically engaged and poetically charged.

With an escalating global environmental crisis, the emotional, poetic, and holistic ecological wisdom demonstrated by the aforementioned artists may well be the cognitive resource we urgently need. As ancient female mythological figures suggest, women’s embodied experiences and perceptual modes carry crucial knowledge that has been overlooked by modern scientific systems. Such knowledge offers guidance for reimagining sustainable relationships between humans and the environment and for articulating a new poetics of survival in an era of ecological transformation. (Translated by Wenrui Zhao)