The Natural History of Stellaric: Archaeology, Futurology, and the Wrinkle of Time
Shen Bo-Cheng
Foreword
Archaic, grand, mysterious, and distant. These words often surface in descriptions of ancient civilizations and even lost worlds (from the Shambhala to the Jurassic). The same adjectives can be used to describe the atmosphere of Tu Wei-Cheng’s work, as they highlight a crucial element of the artist’s creative philosophy: Time, or more specifically, “historical conceptual time.” From anthropological, geological, and cosmic chronologies; to epochs of ancient civilizations spanning multiple millennia; to paleontological periods spanning tens to hundreds of millions of years; such grand scales of time represent the most substantial constituent throughout Tu’s body of work. Although this element is presented to the viewer in quiescence, its presence is inexhaustibly profound.
If time should represent an intangible element of the artist’s work, then place — or the viewer’s perception of place — is another crucial element that occupies a passive presence in his work. The ancient civilizations fabricated by the artist point to a distant and exotic land, while his fossilized creations denote a remote wilderness where the imagination flourishes. The absence of place is the other foundational element that constitutes the vast scale of Tu’s work.
Zeroing in on Tu’s on-site works, which occupy a single point between the grand axes of ancient time and distant space, it becomes clear that each work represents a mere microcosm of the artist’s boundless imagination. Just as museums of the world seek to distill and collect immense phenomena across history, each of Tu’s creations is a whimsical, pseudo-museological survey, extraction, and collection of natural history. Whether he is producing physical dimensions of ancient cities, architectural ruins of ancient civilizations, or ancient fossils, the artist’s creative practice combines personal imagination with the discipline of natural history. He has created an unspecified realm, a fragmented field that exists only in the cosmos, a place that can only be pieced together and accessed through the artist’s belief and imagination. Tu has expanded the temporal and spatial scales of his previous explorations from the Earth to the cosmos, presenting to the viewer a natural history of the Stellaric.
Throughout his practice, Tu superimposes the ancient and future time scales.[1] The artist treats time as a thin layer that can be stacked and interlaced, which allows him to manipulate the concepts of history and future (whether humanistic or naturalistic) through the aesthetics of his imagined world, thus creating an imaginary museum structured to reflect his unique taxonomic thinking. It is Tu’s macroscopic vision of the cosmos[2] — informed by archaeology, futurism, and even silicon-based biology[3] — that constitutes his whimsical museum of natural history.
I. The Birth of Fantasy, Imagination, and Natural History
Although contemporary biology has constructed a rigorous and exacting image of scientific knowledge under prestigious disciplines, such as molecular biology, genetic engineering, and evolutionary biology, it is interesting to note that the origins of modern biology take root in the phantasmagoric worlds of fantasy, mythology, and imagination. Tracing the development of images through the perspective of cultural history, we may deduce that the earliest iterations of contemporary biology were explored through art, mythology, and grand voyages in the Age of Discovery.
For instance, the Carta Marina (1539) features a plethora of aquatic monsters. Readers of Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium (ca. 1551–1558) as well as Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Natural History of Serpents and Dragons (1640) and Monstrorum Historia (1642) will encounter a pantheon of whimsical creatures. Fantastical fauna and flora can be found in the pages of many early scientific publications, from the mysterious Voynich Manuscript (ca. 1404–1438) to Leonhart Fuchs’ Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants (1542). Reflecting on these important historical documents, one may reasonably infer that during the nascent development of natural history, imagination played a more profound and influential role than logical reason.
Bearing in mind the drive to expand intellectual horizons during the Baroque era[4], one may deduce that it is precisely this kind of worldly whimsy that prompted the inception of natural history, cabinets of curiosities, and contemporary museums. At the same time, the advent of fantastical creatures also stimulated the kitsch practice of creating “evidence” of their existence, such as skeletons and mummified remains of mermaids, unicorns, and more. Throughout the Baroque period, this interest in collecting bizarre memorabilia profoundly influenced artists and scholars of the time, including Albrecht Dürer, who created a print of a rhinoceros that was anatomically precise but exhibited playful inaccuracies in its appearance. Dürer’s accurate yet fanciful depiction of the rhinoceros reflects new artistic and intellectual trends that arose in the West during the Renaissance, spurred on by the revival of esoteric knowledge — from alchemy to Hermeticism[5] — and the revealing of new worlds and species throughout the Age of Discovery. Such trends later evolved into a frenzy for discovering and imagining new species during the Baroque period, and articulating the surrounding world with an air of whimsy became an artistic tradition.
As such, we may see the hyperrealistic specimens of Mark Dion and Damien Hirst, as well as Patricia Piccinini’s genetically modified mutants, as reflections of new evolutionary drives and interests in generating new species. Compared to the fantastical creations of his Western contemporaries, which are charged with criticisms and interrogations of specific intellectual domains such as bioethics, Tu’s works are not intended to challenge specific epistemological fields (e.g. genetic engineering, pure mechanics). Conversely, Tu’s whimsical explorations are more inclined to navigate the intersecting evolutions of nature and technology. While the biological specimens created by Western contemporary artists focus more on the dialectical discussion of bioethics, Tu’s creations are more akin to continuations of Baroque-era whimsy.
Upon recognizing the influence of the Baroque-era frenzy over nautical explorations and fantastical creatures, we may consider Tu’s works as comparable to sci-fi explorations of the Novacene. If we situate the artist’s technologically-evolved creatures in the context of the Stellaric, we may begin to understand his Transformer-esque fossils of mechanical creatures, plants that resemble transmission lines, and creatures with the upper body of a Megaloceros and the lower body of a shark. These seemingly absurd life forms in fact correspond to classical descriptions of mythical creatures, so through the artist’s calculated manipulations, the creatures of ancient mythology become fossils of an imagined sci-fi future.
In his encyclopedic Manual de zoología fantástica (1957)[6], Jorge Luis Borges compiles descriptions of mythical beasts conceived across classical, medieval, and modern history — from the monsters of Homer’s epic tales and the beasts in the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy, to the fantastical creatures that appear in the works of Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and C. S. Lewis. The enduring fascination with fantasy and myth projects a compelling image of human curiosity about life and its various forms: Where does life come from? Why does it exist? What is the meaning of life?These time-honored questions accentuate a crucial element of Tu’s artistic practice.
Regarding the origins of life in his work, the artist has embraced the new life form proposed by James Lovelock in his seminal book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (2019): the “cyborg,” a half-human, half-machine life form that is prophesied to emerge through artificial intelligence. In the artist’s work, new forms of “life” emerge from what Kevin Kelly[7] has coined as the “technium,”[8] the globally interconnected matrix of technology that surrounds all of life on Earth. If “new life” materializes through the technium, the philosophical inquiries “Where does life come from? What is the meaning of life?” morph into new questions posed by Kelly: What is technology’s place in the universe? What does technology mean in our lives?
Reflecting upon the artist’s pseudo-biological fossils that incorporate mechanical structures and electronic gadgets, we find that the answers to the questions above are that technology allows new evolutions of life to form in other parts of the universe, and the purpose of technology is to provide possibilities for the next stage of evolution. These new forms of life will be new species constructed from silicon and carbon elements. Viewed through the frameworks of Kelly’s new philosophical inquiries and Lovelock’s cyborg theory, Tu has cultivated an alien cyborg species immortalized in the sediment of a distant land in the Stellaric. In other words, much like Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Baroque masterpieces Natural History of Serpents and Dragons (1640) and Monstrorum Historia (1642), Tu’s works provide imaginative accounts of and encounters with prospective life forms. The artist has created a new natural history within the Novacene and a new knowledge system constructed by fantasy and imagination, as human civilization prepares to enter the Stellaric. Tu’s work demonstrates the innate human impulse towards curiosity and idealism, as well as the human tendency to imagine, create, and construct with limitless imagination.
II. The Otherworldly, the Interstellar, and the Wrinkle of Time
It is common knowledge that fossils are relics of a distant past. However, in contrast to Newton’s concept of absolute time, where the past, present, and future belong to a single linear and relative chronology, time is not a linear, unidirectional, and single-dimensional vector in Tu’s universe. Rather, it is more like a thin layer that stretches toward infinity; it folds, curls, and rolls, so that the past, present, and future can blanket and overlap each other like the layers of a mille-feuille. The artist’s fossil creations not only point to a distant past, but also imply the existence of a distant future.
Through his manipulation of time, Tu constructs a mystical otherworld fueled by his curiosity and imagination. It is a realm that is entirely inaccessible to humanity, but nonetheless remains a target of mankind’s unwavering curiosity. Just as all imagined otherworlds have been preserved through oral and written tradition from ancient to modern times, the artist gives full play to his sense of the fantastic, and pieces together a fragmentary glimpse of a distant, far-flung otherworld through his fossil creations.
In Tu’s otherworld, biology and technology have converged to form a symbiotic union. Just as humanity will be the progenitor of the new Stellaric, the artist’s work presents a prophecy of the new cosmic era. One may take the climactic epiphany of the film Interstellar — “They are us” — as a reference point to understand the context of Tu’s cosmic evolution of life. The artist’s universe contains an evolutionary dynamic ruled by hybrid organic-mechanical species, and the unseen protagonist of this otherworld is the man (the artist/engineer) who has created them. The combination of fantastic beasts and futuristic machinery in this exhibition culminates in an amalgamation of myth and science fiction. It is only in this new evolutionary arena on this enormous interstellar scale that the answer to Kevin Kelly’s profound inquiry — What is technology’s place in the universe? — can begin to take shape.
In Tu’s wrinkle of time, man uses technology to produce a new genesis in a faraway paradise across galactic scales of space and time, and his creations provide an exclusive first glimpse into this new otherworld.
Epilogue
The timeless tradition of inventing otherworlds projects the power of human curiosity, and these imagined realities fill the gaps in imagination and cognition while inoculating humanity with passion and aspirations. Through the fossils of his imagined natural history, Tu Wei-Cheng presents the viewer with a glimpse into the evolution of a new species in the galactic age. Ultimately, legends of wonderlands, exotic territories, utopias, lost continents, fantastic beasts, and distant peoples all exhibit a common feature: Whether they come from ancient legends, modern myths, or even imagined futures, these otherworlds allow unique beliefs and faiths to circulate and spread across populations, and Tu Wei-Cheng’s otherworld is certain to follow suit.
The superposition of states (taking “Schrödinger’s Cat” for example) indicates that two incompatible states (life and death) can exist simultaneously on the quantum level. Here, the author uses this description to distinguish the superposition of two temporal states, past and future, which is Tu’s consistent artistic approach.
In English, there are two different words, universe and cosmos, and here the author chooses “cosmos” (perceptible universe) instead of “universe” (objective universe) to represent the concept of universe. “Universe” represents all that is known, seen, and felt, while “cosmos” encompasses all known, unknown, and not yet conceived aspects, thereby empowering the creator to imagine the universe in a perceptible manner.
Silicon-based life refers to organisms that are composed of silicon. Silicon-based life is still a hypothesis, but it has been
While the Baroque period generally refers to a 17th- and 18th- century Western art style, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) used the term baroco (the Medieval Latin origin for baroque) to describe strange objects associated with magic and the supernatural. This fixation on the fantastical became a widespread cultural phenomenon in the second
Hermeticism (or Hermetism) is a Classical European religious and philosophical system based largely on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (“Hermes the Thrice-Greatest”). The central text, the Emerald Tablet, is a treatise on three core tenets of Hermeticism: alchemy, astrology, and theurgy. Hermeticism has profoundly influenced Western esotericism, and it played a crucial role during the Renaissance and the Reformation. The two earliest known sources of the Emerald Tablet are the Sirr al-khalīqa wa-ṣanʿat al-ṭabīʿa (The Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature) (ca. A.D. 750–850) by the pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana, and the Kitāb Usṭuqus al-uss al-thānī (The Second Book of the Element of the Foundation) (ca. A.D. 850–950) attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan.
Ten years later, Borges published an expanded edition, titled El Libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings).
Kevin Kelly is the founding editor of Wired magazine and former editor-in-chief of Whole Earth Review. He is a writer, photographer, conservationist, and scholar of Asian and digital cultures.
Kevin Kelly proposes the technium as the seventh kingdom of life (the other six kingdoms are: Bacteria/Eubacteria, Archaea/Archaebacteria, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia), and that the products of science and technology have the ability to reproduce, evolve, and adapt; therefore, they have the characteristics of living organisms.
