Thesis: Bioscience and Contemporary Art in the Sinophone Cultures (1989-Present)

Supervised by Dr Wenny Teo and Professor Jo Applin 

In this thesis I focus on how biomedicine and biotechnology— understood as the technological use of biological reproduction and transgenic practices, and of biosecurity and life-control systems— transforms image making in the Sinophone cultures from the late 1980s to the present day. Looking at the practices of artists such as Li Shan, Lu Yang, Pei-Ying Lin, Candice Lin and Jes Fan, I examine the ways in which these artists engage with knowledges of biotechnology and biomedicine, and the implications of these for gender, sexuality, race, subjectivity and the conception of ecology. I ask how the artists engage translocal knowledge and visual tropes in their diverse responses to the contemporary biotechnological condition, often uncritically seen as originating in ‘the West’. Further, I explore to what extent a post-anthropocentric ecological ethics is formed through the artists’ distinct means of engaging with the discourses of new biomedical technologies.