For her project, which begins this month, Line will be hosted by Centre for Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University and the Department of Anthropology at Osaka University. She will furthermore be affiliated with Tokyo University of the Arts, Hong Kong University, and the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan.

Line’s project, which is titled “Border-zones of empire: art, ecology, and negotiations of territory in East Asia,” bridges many facets of the environmental humanities. She will be researching the still growing group of artists across East Asia who are transforming themselves into farmer-activists, engaged in struggled for territorial belonging and rooted in inter-East Asian solidarity from the grassroots. In the shadow of ecological crises as well as past and current geo-political tensions, artists partake in imaginative and material struggles for who and what gets to live on the land, and under which circumstances. Experimental art-farming with permaculture and natural farming principles in particular, serve to connect public concerns in and across places caught amidst post-, de-, and re-colonial processes. Specifically, Line’s project will explore why and how art-farms have been gaining impetus in Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan as a significant contemporary eco-artistic and political form, at places positioned concretely and figuratively in the border-zones of global imperial histories and current Sino-imperial expansions within the region.

We are very excited to have Line affiliated with CEH for the next two years, and welcome her to the CEH community! For those interested in learning more about Line’s research, she’ll be giving a CEH virtual seminar, titled “Aesthetics of Repair,” on 16 June. Please see the CEH event calendar for more information.