Currents 826 is excited to present Ecological Soup: Interspecies Encounters, a solo exhibit of Jiabao Li’s work. Li will take over CURRENTS’ year round gallery space with a series of works that challenge our human-centric worldview by exploring the intricate connections between human and non-human species. Ecological Soup is the first satellite exhibit to open for CURRENTS’ 2023 festival season.
The show weaves throughout the gallery, presenting works the artist co-creates with diverse non-human species. Including installation works such as “Squid Map,” “Mouse Coach,” “Chthulucene,”and “Once a Glacier,” the exhibition invites visitors to re-enchant their understanding of nature and destabilize hierarchies of intelligence; fostering empathy and inspiring action toward a more sustainable and inclusive future.
Human-centric thinking is harming our planet and its myriad life forms in ways that can’t be repaired. As the ravages of the Anthropocene rampage on, our call for the next decade will be to reimagine how we live through the lens of the environment; to shift our perspectives from human-centered, ego-centric, profit-driven post-industrialist thinking to a multi-species, eco-centric worldview. This requires a fundamental perception change, rewiring our views of “the natural” and developing new choreographies of entanglement.
About the Artist
Jiabao Li creates work addressing climate change, interspecies world sharing, humane technology, and a just, sustainable future. Her mediums include wearable, robot, AR/VR, projection, performance, software, and installation. She is a member of NEW INC Creative Science at the New Museum. In Jiabao’s TED Talk, she uncovered how technology mediates the way we perceive reality.
Jiabao is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her lab explores the intersection of art, design, technology, and biology. The interests are broadly spanning from interspecies co-creation to knowledge graph, from Biosensors to menstrual blood proteomes. She is co-founder and chief product officer of Endless Health and previously of Snapi Health. She serves on juries for major design awards such as IDSA, D&AD, Biodesign Challenge, etc.
Jiabao is the recipient of numerous awards, including iF Design Award, Forbes China 30 Under 30, Falling Walls, National Endowment for the Arts, STARTS Prize, Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award, Core77, IDSA, A’ Design Award, Webby Award, Cannes World Film Festival Best VR short award.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, at Ars Electronica, Today Art Museum Biennale, Anchorage Museum, Currents New Media Gallery, Milan and Dubai Design Week, Shanghai Ming Contemporary Museum, ISEA, OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, CHI, Donghu Shan Art Museum, MOOD Museum of Design, Alaska State Museum.
