Beings of the Earth:

Of Bodies, Labor, and Becoming

Kaihō Yūsetsu, Zhou Maoshu Admiring Lotuses, Edo period (1615-1868), mid-17th century. Hanging Scroll; ink on silk. Image: 32.4 x 49.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Beings of the Earth explores the entanglements of bodies, labor, and environments as an interconnected ecology of co-existence. Foregrounding the bodies of women, animals, bacteria, and land, this exhibition draws on invisible forms of labor from pre-modern to contemporary East Asian and Asian-American art. In doing so, Beings of the Earth examines how all laboring bodies, particularly hidden bodies, act as active participants in shaping and transforming the living landscape while also challenging the arbitrary divisions between human and the non-human.

In an act of becoming, labor is bodily and relational, and carries the imprint of networks that bind all of life together.

As you walk through this exhibition, visitors are invited to consider the following questions:

What kinds of labor do we overlook in the environments we inhabit?
Where does your body interact or intersect with the labor of other beings—human and non-human alike?
What does it mean to “be of the earth,” not just on it?

"Heaven, Earth, and I were produced together, and all things and I are one."

-Zhuangzi 莊子 (late 4th century BC)

Jiao Bingzhen (1689–1726)

Yuzhi gengzhi tu 御製耕織圖 (Imperially Commissioned Illustrations of Agriculture and Sericulture), 1696

Kangxi reign (1662–1722), Qing dynasty

Woodblock print on paper

24 × 24 cm

The British Museum, London

Labor and human bodies against the backdrop of the natural world has long been a subject of visual representation.

Commissioned by the Kangxi Emperor (1654-1722), this series of woodblock prints illustrates scenes of harmonious labor in a well-ordered and peaceful Qing empire. Although instructional in nature, the mundane tasks of human laborers—plowing and planting—are transformed into acts of national significance.

Echoing the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi that "Heaven, Earth, and I were produced together, and all things and I are one," these prints envision the co-existence of humans, animals, and the land. Yet also portrayed in the image are the asymmetries of labor: humans guide animals to harvest crops and extract sustenance from the land. Thus human survival depends on the continuous, often unseen work of the earth and its other inhabitants.

It is from this point that Beings of the Earth turns to the hidden labors of excluded bodies. After all, where are the women?