Regenerative Artivism: Listening to the Work of Asian Women Artivists

In this introductory episode, I lay out the core idea of regenerative artivism and the scope of the podcast. Speaking from southern California with my attention grounded in East Asia, I reflect on how art, care, and collective imagination help communities confront social and environmental injustice and craft/cultivate more livable futures in damaged places. Using the image of a threatened valley and the community-organized Meinung Yellow Butterfly Festival (美濃黃蝶祭), I introduce regeneration as an ongoing practice rather than a single victory.

I explain why Season 1 focuses on women artivists in the greater China region and why their often-overlooked work in creeks, kitchens, schools, villages, and resettlement sites matters for environmental thinking. I situate the podcast in relation to my own long-term field research and to the limits of academic writing, framing the series as a slow, seminar-like space for listening, critical reflection, and grounded imagination. The episode closes with an invitation to consider a place that matters to you, the damages it has absorbed, and the quiet forms of care already at work there.

Keywords
regenerative artivism; regenerative aesthetics, socially engaged art; environmental art; ecofeminism; environmental humanities; Asia, East Asia; Greater China; community art; environmental justice; social justice; regeneration; care; multispecies relations; public pedagogy; art and ecology; women artivists

Key References 

Demos, T. J. Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016.

ECOARTASIA. Digital Archive of Chinese Socially and Ecologically Engaged Art. https://ecoartasia.net/.

Gablik, Suzi. The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1991.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Kester, Grant H. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Lerner, Steve. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Wang, Meiqin. "Ecology, Environmental Art, and Sustainable Community Building: The Meinung Yellow Butterfly Festival as a Case of Environmental Activism in Taiwan." International Journal of Social Sustainability in Economic, Social, and Cultural Context 19, no. 2 (2023): 75–101.

Wang, Meiqin. Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China: Voices from Below. London: Routledge, 2019.

Wang, Meiqin, ed. Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2022.

Transcript

You are listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. I am your host, Meiqin Wang, an art historian working in contemporary Asian art and the environmental humanities. In each episode, we explore how Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers use creative, place-based practice to confront social and environmental injustice and cultivate more livable futures. Thank you for joining me. Let us begin.

In this first season, I am planning six episodes focusing on women artivists working in the Greater China region, released roughly every two weeks, in addition to this introduction. We will move slowly, focusing on one practitioner or project at a time, so that each story has enough space to unfold. 

This introduction episode is a beginning, a kind of verbal sketchbook. I want to use it to set the scene. What do I mean by regenerative artivism? Why focus on Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers? How does this podcast grow out of years of research and fieldwork? And what can you expect from this space as it unfolds over time?

If you are listening to this, chances are you are already concerned about the state of the world. Perhaps you work in art, activism, education, or community organizing. Perhaps you are a student trying to make sense of how culture, politics, and ecology intersect. Perhaps you are somewhere between all these positions at once.

Or perhaps you are simply looking for stories of people who refuse to give up, who are crafting other ways of living together with land, water, and more-than-human neighbors. People who are not waiting for permission from institutions or governments, but starting where they are, with whatever resources they have, to repair relations that have been damaged.

Wherever you are, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for bringing your attention – which is one of the most precious things we have – into this conversation.

I want to start not with a definition, but with an image.

Imagine a rural town at the edge of a valley. The hills have been marked out by survey stakes for a dam project that promises industrial growth. For years, local residents have been told that sacrifice is necessary, that the valley must flood to increase regional water supply so that factories and cities downstream can thrive. On paper, this is called development. On the ground, it feels like dispossession.

You can picture the surveyors’ flags fluttering in the wind, the official maps pinned up in government offices, the engineering diagrams that treat the valley as a cross section of soil and rock. You can also picture the kitchen tables where local residents gathered to talk into the night, worrying about biodiversity loss, the potential inundation of the township, and what it would mean to lose the places that had shaped their lives.

Now imagine that in this same place, people begin to respond not only with petitions and protests, but with songs, with rituals, with collective painting, with a festival of yellow butterflies. They invite artists and students to walk with them, to document species, to revive local stories and ceremonies, to transform resistance into an ongoing practice of care.

Young intellectuals who have returned from college begin organizing seasonal gatherings, where local children dress as butterflies, elders tell stories about the valley before the roads were built, and researchers share what they have learned about the insects and plants that depend on this particular microclimate. People cook together, plan together, and argue with each other about tactics and priorities.

Over time, those gatherings reshape how children understand their home valley. They change how adults talk about land, water, and responsibility. Even after the immediate threat passes, the relationships forged in that struggle endure and evolve. New groups form, dedicated to watershed protection, organic farming, or local history. Artists keep returning, not as saviors parachuting in, but as companions in a long process.

This is not a hypothetical scene. The place I am describing is Yellow Butterfly Valley in Meinung, a rural Hakka township in southern Taiwan. The anti-dam movement there began in the early 1990s as a fight against a planned reservoir and has since grown into a broader movement for ecological conservation and community self-determination. Out of that struggle, the Meinung Yellow Butterfly Festival （美浓黄蝶祭）was born in 1995, and it has now been held for over thirty years.

For me, that is one face of regenerative artivism. 

It is not just art about the environment. It is not just art about injustice. It is art that emerges from situated struggles and then helps to cultivate new forms of life, new habits of attention, new networks of mutual support. It is art entangled with activism and yet not exhausted by it. It is art that stays after the cameras leave.

Why a podcast about this, and why now?

We are living in a moment where words like sustainability, resilience, and green transition are everywhere. Governments, corporations, even museums have learned how to speak the language of environmental concern. They publish glossy reports, announce ambitious net-zero targets, and commission spectacular eco-themed installations.

But this surface of green vocabulary often covers over deeper patterns that are still extractive. Land is still taken. Rivers are still polluted. Communities are still treated as disposable. The same infrastructures that move electricity, goods, and data around the world continue to depend on sacrifice zones – places and people deemed acceptable to harm.

At the same time, the climate crisis is no longer abstract. In many parts of Asia, it arrives as floods, droughts, typhoons, heat waves, crop failures, fish kills. It arrives as the slow violence of desertification or salinization, and as the sudden violence of a broken dam or a collapsed hillside. It intersects with histories of colonialism, authoritarian development, patriarchy, and racialized and gendered labor.

In such a context, art can easily seem secondary, even frivolous. What use is a mural, a performance, or a community weaving workshop when glaciers are melting and air is toxic? Should we not focus all our energy on policy, on technology, on lawsuits, on direct action?

These are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers.

One answer is that art alone is never enough. It cannot, by itself, rewrite a law or shut down a coal plant. But another answer is that if we look closely at how people actually survive and resist, we see that stories, images, and shared practices are not optional extras. They are part of the infrastructure of survival.

They help people name what is happening when official language tries to blur it. They make loss visible and mournable. They hold together fragile coalitions through symbols, songs, and shared rituals. They allow people to imagine futures that are not dictated only by capital and state power.

Over the past decade, I have spent a lot of time with artivists and community organizers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and beyond who are working precisely at this intersection. They do not always call themselves environmental artists or activists. Some simply say, I am doing what I can for my community. Some say, I just wanted to protect this river, or this school, or this village. Some do not label what they do at all.

But if we pay attention, patterns emerge. Practices of care. Practices of listening. Practices of staying with damaged places instead of abandoning them. Practices of slowing down in systems that reward speed and extraction. Practices of sharing knowledge horizontally, across generations and social positions.

This podcast grows from that long process of listening.

It also grows from a desire to move beyond the confines of academic writing. As an art historian and environmental humanities scholar, I spend much of my time with books and articles. I value those forms deeply. But there are stories, voices, and textures that do not fit easily into printed pages. There are moments in the field – a silence in a meeting, the smell of a polluted river at dusk, the way a child describes their neighborhood – that are hard to convey in formal prose.

Audio allows something different. It allows a slower, more reflective pacing. It allows you to listen while your hands are busy with daily life. It allows ideas to travel along with breathing and background noise. I want to experiment with that form, to see what happens when art history and environmental humanities step into the intimate space of a listener’s ear.

So why the term regenerative artivism?

The word activism signals intentional efforts to change unjust conditions. Artivism is often used when art and activism are tightly braided together, when the making of images, performances, or installations is itself part of a movement’s practice rather than just a commentary.

Regeneration adds another layer. It suggests not only resistance, but the possibility of repairing, regrowing, or recomposing damaged relations between humans and the more-than-human world. It points to cycles rather than one-off events, to processes rather than products.

Regeneration is not a simple return to some pure past. Landscapes have been irreversibly altered. Species have been lost. Communities have been displaced. There is no way back to an untouched nature that probably never existed in the first place. Nostalgia can be comforting, but it can also be paralyzing.

Instead, regeneration, as I use it here, is about asking: in the ruins of extractive development, what kinds of living arrangements can still be nurtured? What new and old forms of reciprocity can be restored or invented? How can artistic and cultural practices contribute to soil healing, water protection, multispecies survival, and human dignity? How can they help communities move from being treated as sacrifice zones to being recognized as sites of knowledge and care? 

When art takes up these questions in a sustained, situated way, it is producing what I call regenerative aesthetics. By this term, I mean the forms, sensibilities, and structures of feeling that grow out of this work: the ways people compose images, sounds, gestures, gatherings, and everyday arrangements to restore damaged relationships – with places, with other people, and with more-than-human beings.

It also means taking seriously the temporal dimension. Regenerative projects are rarely short. They unfold over years. They involve returning to the same place, the same people, the same questions, again and again. They include setbacks, disappointments, and reorientations.

Regenerative artivism, then, is not a new label to be applied from the outside. It is a way of naming and connecting practices that are already happening, often quietly, across many different places. It is a working concept, an invitation to think together, rather than a finished theory.

In some projects, regeneration might involve very literal ecological work: restoring wetlands, improving soil health, re-establishing native plants, or monitoring water quality. In others, it might involve regenerating social fabrics that have been torn apart by migration, displacement, or political violence. In still others, it might involve regenerating cultural memory, such as reviving languages, rituals, and craft techniques that carry ecological wisdom.

What unites these different efforts is a commitment to more than symbolic protest. Regenerative artivists are less interested in producing objects for white cube galleries and more interested in cultivating long-term relationships. Their works are often ongoing processes rather than finished products, held together by trust, repetition, and shared responsibility.

This does not mean that institutions, exhibitions, or documentation are unimportant. Many of the projects I will discuss do intersect with museums, biennials, and funding bodies. But the center of gravity lies elsewhere: in the thick, sometimes messy entanglements of place-based work.

Why focus on Asian women artivists in particular?

Partly, this is a reflection of where I have done most of my fieldwork: in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and across parts of East Asia. I am most accountable to these contexts. I know their languages and histories better than I know others. I have sat on their plastic stools, eaten at their kitchen tables, and walked their polluted shorelines.

But it is also a political and methodological choice.

If you look at global conversations about environmental art, you will notice that certain regions and voices dominate. Euro-American land art, large-scale eco-installations in museums, Western male artists who move heavy machinery or plant forests as grand gestures. Those stories are not unimportant, but they are incomplete. They can make it seem as if environmental art is primarily about spectacular gestures in vast landscapes, backed by substantial resources.

Meanwhile, in villages on the loess plateau, in informal settlements on the edge of megacities, in coastal fishing towns, in Indigenous mountain communities, women have been organizing art workshops, theatre projects, oral history programs, community gardens, and ritual practices that respond very directly to environmental and social injustice.

They negotiate with local officials, persuade skeptical neighbors, teach children, care for aging parents, and, in the midst of all that, also make art. They work inside public schools and outside them, in church basements and factory dormitories, in borrowed classrooms and under temporary tarpaulins.

Most of these women will never be branded as global art stars. Many do not have the time or resources to travel on the international biennial circuit. Their work often circulates in much more modest channels: local schools, village squares, neighborhood social media groups, regional festivals, community newsletters. But the depth of their contribution to ecological thought and practice is profound.

By putting Asian women artivists at the center of this podcast, I want to do at least three things.

First, I want to challenge the implicit geography of environmental art discourse. Environmental thinking does not move only from West to East, from theory to practice. It moves through rice terraces, mangrove swamps, factory dormitories, and university classrooms. It moves through languages other than English. It is shaped by people who are not usually credited as theorists.

Second, I want to highlight the forms of labor that make regenerative artivism possible. Care work, logistical work, emotional work, translation work. Much of this labor is gendered and undervalued. When a community art project appears in a gallery document or a funding report, what you rarely see is the endless messaging, cooking, conflict mediation, and grant writing that holds it together.

Third, I want to foreground the embodied dimension of this work. Regenerative artivism is not just a matter of ideas. It is also about hands in soil, feet in muddy water, backs bent over looms or film equipment, lungs breathing polluted air while documenting a protest. To talk about regeneration without acknowledging the bodies that carry it out would be an abstraction.

There is also another reason. Many of the women I have learned from operate in conditions of precarity. They balance artistic work with teaching, caregiving, and often unstable funding. They face censorship, surveillance, or political pressure. Their projects can disappear quickly if circumstances change. A podcast can help create an additional record, a trace that remains even if the original website goes offline or the original building is demolished.

Let me share a few brief scenes that will, in future episodes, become fuller stories.

In one place, a group of women farmers work with artists to weave flood-damaged debris and traditional materials into large sculptures that travel between village and city, carrying conversations about climate change, government neglect, and the stubborn love people have for their ravaged hometowns. In the workshop, they sort through broken wood, twisted metal, and household fragments while children and visiting city residents move from onlookers to participants.

In another context, a young artist in a fast-growing Chinese metropolis turns a tiny rented apartment into a project space where migrant workers, children, and volunteers experiment with photography, theatre, and map-making. Over time, participants begin to see their overcrowded neighborhood not only as precarious, but as a site of knowledge and creativity, mapping informal paths and rooftop gardens, staging small plays about leaks and demolitions, and filling the apartment with drawings, notes, recordings, and shared meals.

Elsewhere, an Indigenous artist returns to a resettlement village after a catastrophic landslide and refuses the story that her community is simply a victim of natural disaster. Working with elders and younger women, she rebuilds textile traditions using plant fibers and plastic tarps from temporary shelters; new motifs of broken bridges and flood markers appear alongside ancestral symbols, and workshops become spaces of mourning, teaching, and story-sharing that counter the official language of reconstruction and development.

These are all instances of regenerative artivism, as I understand it. They differ in form, but they share an insistence that art be accountable to specific places and communities, and that environmental justice cannot be separated from social justice.

So what, concretely, will this podcast offer?

Each episode in this first season will take roughly half an hour. Some episodes will be devoted to a single case: one artist, one project, one place. In those episodes, I will walk you through the context that gave rise to the work, the processes involved, the conflicts and compromises, and the kinds of regeneration it seeks to nurture. Other episodes will be more conceptual. In those, we might explore themes like soil and memory, water and infrastructural violence, multispecies alliances, eco-pedagogies, or embodied ecologies. I will draw on specific examples but focus on the larger patterns and questions they raise.

We might ask: what does it mean to treat soil not just as a resource, but as a historical archive? How do artivists work with rivers that are heavily engineered, dammed, or polluted? How do they think about collaboration with nonhuman beings without romanticizing them? How can teaching itself be reimagined as a regenerative practice rather than simply a way of transmitting information?

Think of it as an ongoing seminar that you can join from your kitchen, your commute, your studio, or your evening walk.

Who is this for?

If you are an artist wondering how to make your practice more accountable to the ecologies you inhabit, I hope you will find both inspiration and cautionary tales here. Regenerative artivism is demanding. It asks for slowness in a world of speed, for long-term commitment in a funding system that rewards novelty, for collaboration in a field that still often celebrates individual genius.

If you are a student or researcher, I hope this will serve as a kind of living archive, a set of narratives and concepts that you can carry into your own work. You might use these episodes as starting points for essays, projects, or conversations with peers. You might also use them to question the categories you have inherited: art versus activism, urban versus rural, human versus nature.

If you are a community organizer, NGO worker, or educator outside the art world, I hope this podcast will offer examples of how cultural practices can support what you are already doing: from environmental monitoring and policy advocacy to mutual aid and neighborhood organizing. You may recognize strategies that you have already been using, or encounter new ones that might be adapted to your context.

And if you simply care about the future of life on this planet, I hope you will find in these episodes not only more reasons to be alarmed, but also reasons to stay involved, to keep paying attention, and to recognize the quiet, persistent work of regeneration that is already under way.

Before we close this introduction episode, I want to say something about expectations.

It can be tempting to romanticize art projects that engage with environmental and social injustice. Beautiful documentation, moving stories, a sense that here, finally, is something hopeful in the midst of crisis. But regenerative artivism is not magic. It cannot, on its own, stop a dam, overturn a mining concession, or reverse global warming.

Sometimes projects fail. Sometimes they unintentionally reproduce the hierarchies they set out to challenge. Sometimes they are co-opted by state or corporate agendas. Sometimes they burn out the very people who sustain them. Sometimes they become too dependent on external funding cycles. Sometimes they reach only those who are already convinced.

In this podcast, I want to be honest about those frictions and limits. Regeneration is not a linear success story. It is messy, uneven, and often painfully slow. That does not make it less important. If anything, it makes it more worthy of close, sustained attention.

So as you listen, I invite you to hold two things together: a commitment to critical analysis and an openness to being moved. You do not have to agree with every interpretation I offer. You might see different possibilities in the same projects. That is good. Regenerative artivism is not a fixed doctrine; it is an evolving field of practice and thought.

I also invite you to notice your own position in relation to the stories you hear. Are you listening as an insider to similar struggles, or as an outsider peering in from a distance? Are you listening from a place that is often portrayed as central in global narratives, or from a place that is routinely treated as peripheral? How do those positionalities shape what feels familiar, what feels surprising, what feels uncomfortable?

Finally, a small invitation.

After you finish this episode, if you have the time and space, take a moment to think about a place that matters to you. It might be a childhood landscape, a street corner in your current city, a river, a coastline, a campus, a rooftop garden, or a piece of vacant land you pass every day.

Ask yourself: what kinds of damage has this place absorbed? Some of that damage might be visible – eroded soil, dying trees, fences, surveillance cameras, new roads cutting through old paths. Some of it might be less visible – rising temperatures, underground water extraction, the disappearance of certain insects or birds.

Then ask: what kinds of care have people extended to this place, quietly or collectively? Perhaps someone planted a tree there without asking for permission. Perhaps neighbors pick up trash after the weekend crowd leaves. Perhaps a local group has been documenting changes over time, or organizing clean-ups, or advocating for protection.

And where, if at all, has art played a role in that story? Maybe there is a mural, a performance, a poem, a song, a small memorial, a social media project. Maybe there is no recognizable art at all, but there are gestures and arrangements that could be understood as regenerative aesthetics, as experiments in how we appear to one another in public.

You do not need to produce anything from this reflection. You do not need to share it with anyone. Simply noticing is already a step toward regeneration. As future episodes unfold, I hope you will carry these grounded, personal connections with you, so that the stories we explore together do not remain abstract.

Thank you for listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures.

If this episode brought someone or some place to mind, I invite you to continue that reflection in your own conversations and practices. You can find a short summary and a few references in the episode description in your listening app.

Until next time, take care of yourself, and take care of the places that sustain you.