Medium Format: Soil Photography, Ecological Mosaics, Dispossession Dr William Schaefer - Associate Professor in Chinese Studies and Visual Culture, Durham University.

Wang Youshen's installation Mei pingmi (Per square meter) (2014) reconfigures urban ecosystems: Wang juxtaposes fragments of drywall from his repeatedly demolished art studios into square mosaics; mosaics of square photographs of surrounding landscapes; photographic surfaces marked by disturbances introduced through Wang's acts of ‘washing' strips of film; and square composites of film, water, soil, and seeds. Wang theorises the square meter as “a countable unit of measurement…[,] uncontrollable everyday behavior…[, and] sustainable artistic production”—-the artificiality and violence of economic abstraction of land into equal units, whose boundaries cut across the land's ecological flows, in tension with the aleatory transformations of art-making, human behaviour, and ecological processes.

Per Square Meter engages with what landscape ecologist Richard Forman calls land mosaics: ecological forms of patches, corridors, and matrices created by and determining interactions and flows of humans, other organisms, energy, and the media of water and land. Forman has conceptualized landscape ecologies in terms of art media, drawing upon concepts of point, line, and plane which artist Paul Klee derived through study of natural forms, and likening the size and boundaries of ecological forms to analogue photography's framing, focus, grain, and resolution.

Both Per Square Meter and the field of landscape ecology begin in brokenness: the fragmentation of land and environment, the loss of habitat, and the dispossession of home. Both artist and ecologists thus turn to mosaics in order to explore forms, flows, and interrelations among human and nonhuman-driven agencies, processes of destruction and growth, disturbance and circulation, dislocation and belonging that constitute landscapes in our present moment—-as well as questions of how to picture such forces and forms together. Wang's mosaics of emerging and disintegrating photographs, drywall, and soil, this lecture aims to show, offer sites for thinking relationships between art-making and ecosystems; how in contemporary photography, the ecological ceaselessly reconstitutes relationships between the figurative and the abstract; and how in the present moment of ecological crisis the ground becomes the figure even as human figures are left to piece together the grounds they have lost.