Christopher Chan

CHRISTOPHER CHAN, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California, received a grant in April 2021 to aid research on “Crafting for the Enemy to Come: The Politics and Poetics of ‘Green’ Infrastructures as Techno-Aesthetic Strategies of Ecological Futures in Taiwan,” supervised by Dr. Daniel Fisher. ‘Russia is the storm, China is climate change,’ Thomas Haldenwang, the German Intelligence Chief declared ominously in 2022, ‘So we are going to have to brace for this climate change in the coming years.’ As the world tries to figure out how to deal with the changing environment, this research examines how environment and politics become conflated through the work of art that both constructs and contends with social imaginations of ecological and geopolitical futures. This study explores how techno-aesthetic strategies are employed in Taiwan and Hong Kong to construct such a transition by examining the politics and poetics of environmental artists. The project situates the socially engaged environmental artist as the new subject of power and possibility within the strategic production of green urban ecologies as infrastructural sites that operate with the new logics of a contemporary existential struggle: one that is simultaneously political, technological, and ecological.