Group Exhibition ShanghART WB Central, Shanghai
Curator: Zhu Yujie
Artists:
Li Shan, Liang Shaoji, Lynn Hershman Leeson
Li Hainan、Long Pan, Liu Shuai, Liu Xin, Pan Caoyuan, Shao Chun, Cherry Song, Wang Yiyi, Wang Yuyu, Zhu Yixiao
ShanghART WB Central is pleased to present the exhibition “Plasmodesmata”, which will open on April 30 and run through June 1. Curated by Tutu Zhu, the exhibition creates an interdisciplinary, symbiotic system that brings together 13 artists. The term Plasmodesmata refers to the channels through which information is exchanged between cells. As a layered metaphor, it activates a contemporary art scene composed of mycelial installations, biological materials, microscopic imagery, and visual data. Information flows, maps, interferes, and reconstructs across organisms, pointing to ecological phenomena of infiltration, rupture, and reorganization. The exhibition invites viewers to enter a living system that exists between science and perception.
The exhibition starts with works and manuscripts by three pioneering artists born in the 1940s—Liang Shaoji, Li Shan, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. Their long-term explorations have expanded the symbiotic relationships between humans and their environments, spanning species and systems. In the underground hall of the space, a new generation of artists continues their dialogue with the life sciences. On a micro level, they re-examine the materiality and agency of life itself, turning the exhibition space into a petri dish of experimentation. The uncontrollable nature of these experiments paradoxically fosters conditions for co-creation, disrupting and renewing the cognitive structures of the ecosystem through random interventions. On a macro level, human and non-human agents form an open system—a network where life, climate, terrain, systems, and technology continuously negotiate with, respond to, and reshape one another. The result is an ever-evolving ecological web, alive with tension and transformation.
Microcosmic scenes and stellar universe intertwine and move synchronically, which reveals the structural commonalities of life across different scales. Bacterial communities expand like cities—organic infrastructures whose traces mark the histories of evolution and symbiosis. At the same time, they mirror unresolved tensions and contradictions embedded in contemporary bioethical discourse.
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