A4 Art MuseumEvents
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Practising with Nature | ‘Little Grass’: Screening and Artist Talk

  • Time
    5 July 2025, 16.30–17.30
  • Location
    4F, A4 Art Museum
  • Artist
    SHU Chutian

Introduction

‘Little Grass’ is a moving image work created by Chutian Shu in 2024. The short film features a fictional protagonist who is displaced from their residence due to urban planning, weaving their experiences together with a discourse on the classification of various plant species. As urban fringes are continuously transformed into new housing estates, the landscape undergoes a metamorphosis where indigenous vegetation and farmland are systematically replaced by the artifice of commercial residential gardens. In these new communities, the greenery curated for warm, luminous modern interiors—such as succulent cacti—represents plants positioned at the ‘centre’. However, concealed beneath this aesthetic is a colonial history of flora: tropical desert plants, uprooted from their native lands, are transported to city centres to serve as symbols of exotic fantasies.
During the post-screening session, SHU Chutian will discuss how her artistic practice utilises archives and moving images to reflect upon the complex histories and realities of nature and culture from specific geographical points of departure. Through character-led storytelling, she will share her multi-dimensional observations on the process of urbanisation and our shifting relationship with the natural world.

  • Title and Project Information

    ‘Little Grass’
    Single-channel video, colour, sound, 15:23, 2024

  • Artist Profile

    SHU Chutian

    Born in 1995, Chutian Shu graduated with an MFA from the Pratt Institute in New York in 2019. Her recent video works focus on the interaction between individuals and their surrounding environments. Through dramatisation, fictional narratives, and meticulously designed sets, she explores the psychological spaces of her characters, recreating absurd situations that transcend the mundane and micro-moments that evade established rules and power systems. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including: Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art (2022), Fosun Foundation (Shanghai, 2020), Hanart TZ Gallery (Hong Kong, 2024), Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival (Xiamen, 2023), Sea World Culture and Arts Center (Shenzhen, 2022), and Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York, 2019), Tutu Gallery (Brooklyn, 2019), and DeKalb Gallery (Brooklyn, 2019).

  • Exercises in Nature

    ‘Exercises in Nature’ is a video screening programme featuring artist works within the LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum’s OPEN-class annual public project. It consists of a series of exercises focused on the collaborative survival of human and non-human lives, centred upon actions and philosophies that transcend anthropocentrism. Originating from diverse geographies, the artists’ practices involve bodily engagement with ecological sites, deepening through research and intervening within social contexts. Their work reveals the microscopic connections between lives, the reduction of species imagery to mere symbols, and the marginalisation of non-human entities.
    These exercises foster a dialogical relationship with all things—a process of perceiving diverse ecological wisdom and an attempt at interspecies coordination. Set within specific temporal and spatial frameworks, these narratives are intrinsically connected to the world of all beings. We cannot interpret these issues in simplistic terms; instead, art provides an alternative path for exploring and imagining multiple worlds.

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