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What was the question or observation that first stayed with you and eventually grew into “Sinophonecene?”?

CB, FK, NW: The initial observation was that despite the Sinophone region's persistent impact and relevance in climate-crisis-related matters as well as the well-known rise of its globalized art worlds, we haven’t seen an in-depth discussion of the interrelation in international scholarly discourse yet. That said, there has been a growing number of articles dedicated to individual and collective ecocritical artworks by artists living and working across the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sinophone spaces beyond these territories as well as in Chinese diasporic settings and we also witnessed an engaged curatorial mediation by senior and junior curators alike during the last two decades. However, these pioneering practices still seem largely understudied in stark contrast to their urgent planetary relevance. This is why we were intrigued by the concept “Sinophonecene” when coming across it in an article co-authored by Hai Ren. It appealed to us because it addresses the interrelation in a critical and relational perspective.

The book introduces the concept of the “Sinophonecene.” How would you explain this idea to readers encountering it for the first time, and what new ways of thinking does it offer?

NW: The neologism is a scholarly proposition to think through the relation between what has been called the “Anthropocene” and the “Sinophone”. Importantly, both concepts have been critically discussed and variously defined, so that there is no uniform understanding of each of them. Rather, we also see opposing views and a lot of promising competing terms related to each of them. Fusing them in one word is thus a complex theoretical provocation, but one that allows us to think through multi-faceted relations between ecological aspects of a planetary crisis that is man-made and conditions as well as artistic responses to it as situated in Chinese-speaking worlds.  

There has been a lot of attention in the artworld directed at the term and concept of the anthropocene in recent years. A considerable amount of catalogs and exhibitions discuss artistic practice in ecocritical aspects. In Germany for example, these group exhibitions rarely featured artists from Sinophone backgrounds, this felt like a huge imbalance, because many artists from the Sinophone region are concerned with different critical aspects of the Anthropocene. With this book at hand, we wanted to bring a broad array of voices together to highlight the impact of the concept on artistic practices concerned with or hailing from sinophone backgrounds.

The title ends with a question mark. Why was it important to leave the concept open-ended?

FK: We decided to frame the “Sinophonecene” with a question mark as we are well aware of the essentializing power of nominal concepts. It could otherwise be misread as a suggestion to modernistically tie the era of man’s disastrous impact on Earth to reductive notions of a national, cultural or linguistic container, while the opposite is our aim. We want to explore transnational and transcultural histories, more-than-human and non-anthropocentric perspectives and aesthetic practices that exactly point to a planetary relationality of the crisis, which does not neatly stop at the aforementioned categorical borders, but is nevertheless also marked by them. So, we think the “Sinophonecene?” is an invitation to critically look into particular spaces, discourses and creative practices of dynamic, contested and globally interconnected “Chinese” worlds and how they can enhance our understanding of what is at stake.

Many people think about environmental issues through science or politics. The book focuses on artistic and curatorial practices. What can art reveal about our changing planet that other fields might miss?

NW: The power of artistic practice is that it can open us to more-than-rational ways of seeing and experiencing the world, or rather worlds in plural. Some of the artworks discussed in our volume show how it is to feel, smell, touch Earth and the traumata we as humans inflicted on her. Many artists explore multi-sensorial ways to tell the crisis “otherwise”, so that planetary cohabitational futures are still imaginable.

In exhibitions, curators and artists are in an open exchange about concepts, and this immediate togetherness offers the possibility to viewers to engage with topics of extinction, climate crises, wondrous plants and forgotten histories on an intellectual, visual as well as empathetic level. Visitors who experience these artworks and exhibitions gain new knowledge that might not be found in science and school books. An artwork can function as time capsule and knowledge transmission, giving insights into ideas and topics that might be overlooked in academic circles or deemed not relevant enough for scientific approaches.

Across the different chapters, artists work with forests, cities, rivers, virtual worlds, and mining landscapes.What surprised you most while bringing these different stories together?

CB: What I found interesting was not the divergence, but actually the similarity in approaches to ecological thought within both Sinophone and Western contexts. While both scholarly and curatorial practice has often turned to ancient Chinese philosophies, such as Daoism and Buddhism in both Sinophone and Western discourses, such as Paul Gladston's and Hai Ren's use of Daoist and Confucianist thought as a lens to understand human-nature relations beyond the culture-nature divide, artists and curators within Sinophone regions also frequently look inward to contemporary indigenous and aboriginal communities for alternative epistemologies, such as Mia Yu, J.J. Gong, as well as Hai Ren. This tendency resonates in the West, where a growing number of eco-critical exhibitions are now actively incorporating local indigenous voices and cosmologies. To me, this parallel suggests a shared sense of urgency—and perhaps a quiet desperation—within industrialized societies, signaling a collective struggle to move beyond the very habits and systems that have perpetuated environmental collapse.

One section of the book is built around conversations with curators rather than academic essays. Why was it important to include these voices?

CB: This was particularly important to us, due to the very concept of the Sinophonecene, which is described as both “locally grounded and planetary in scope.” To fully understand the locally grounded nature of this concept, we decided to speak directly with curators who have been working with this subject matter within and about Sinophone regions. The importance of speaking with curators was twofold: First, these conversations gave us a much broader understanding of the artists engaged with ecological themes, as curators often provided an extensive list of relevant practitioners at once—allowing us to mirror individual networks and correlations between artists and communities. Second, they offered insight into how curatorial practice operates within Sinophone regions, and whether there are particular tendencies in approaching eco-critical subject matter there.

The five conversations in the volume reveal the immense variation in curatorial approaches engaged with this subject matter. Among curators based in the regions they work in—such as Mia Yu and J.J. Gong—we observed that hands-on, field-based research was especially prominent, whereas this approach was less pronounced among the two younger curators we spoke with, Xiao Zong (Shanghai-based) and Bettina Freimann (Hamburg-based). 

A key distinction lies in how curators navigate strict censorship in mainland China. For instance, Mia Yu employs what is known as a “speaking-nearby” approach by inviting speakers from outside of China to discuss their research on environmental issues, effectively avoiding censorship risks by addressing the core subject matter indirectly. The use of this method even leads to new perceptual angles resulting from transcultural co-learning and exchange, as explained by Mia Yu in her interview with us. Further discussion and research would be needed before drawing any further conclusions on curatorial tendencies dealing with ecological subject-matter in Sinophone regions. What could be hypothesized is that the planetary scope of ecological themes may often transcend cultural differences, despite being locally grounded, and may lead to universal curatorial tendencies, such as efforts to distance oneself from human-centric perspectives, and deeper engagement with peripheral indigenous cosmologies.

Were there moments during your research, writing, or conversations with artists and curators that changed your own thinking?

CB: One passage I found particularly eye-opening was in an article “Landscape without Nature: Ecological Reflections in Contemporary Chinese Art” by art historian Dr. Chang Tan, which debunks the romanticized Western notion that ancient China lived in mystical harmony with nature. Tan points out that traditional ink paintings—typically cited as proof of that harmony in Western discourses—were in fact often lamenting the loss of natural habitats due to human intervention, even thousands of years ago. This revelation complicated my understanding of the shanshui tradition and its ecocritical potential, which Alina Sinelnyk also explores in this volume through the works of Li Huayi and Yang Yongliang.

In terms of artistic practice, Nora Wölfing's chapter fundamentally reshaped my understanding of new media art and its relationship to nature. Rather than signaling an escape from the natural world, CGI-based practices often reveal a profound yearning for it, positioning nature and technology as co-evolutionary rather than oppositional. Similarly, Mia Yu's framing of the technological and the natural as "porous" and mutually constitutive—exemplified in her concept of the "feral assemblage" between human, machine (drone) and post-natural landscape, which Franziska Koch elaborates upon in “Have you Seen A Subhuman Cry? How the Films Extractions (Theo Jean Cuthand, 2019) and Eme Cosmos (Mia Yu, 2024) Explore Cosmotechnical Worldings in Canada and China” (p. 183 in this volume)—offers a generative way to think beyond the destructive boundaries of extraction and toward more entangled, relational modes of cohabitation.

NW: The process, evolving from our reading group in 2022, to the conception of the symposium in 2023, to the editing process throughout  2024 and 2025 and now the finalized book in 2026, was a shared journey we took as scholars. This process of reading the articles and following the thoughts of my colleagues, reading about artists I had not known yet and discovering aspects of artists I know through the eyes of other researchers, while sticking to one complex topic, was a highly rewarding endeavour. This changed my view on collaborative academic work on many levels, and I am deeply grateful for this, as this will certainly have an impact on my further academic collaborations and outlook also on co-authored texts and books. On another level, I see this process of collaboration as deeply mirrored in the topic of the book itself: we as humans are profoundly social and interactive, if we can muster the courage to focus on our strength for equal collaboration instead of the prototype hero-character, the winner-takes-it-all mentality, then there is a good chance, that humanity will find ways to face this ecological and multifaceted time of crises, which has been framed as the "Anthropocene", and as we had the chance to think through the “Sinophonecene”.This collaborative approach of shared resources and mutual growth that brought this book into being, is symbolized also in the layout of the book: from seeds, to saplings, to branching out to composting.

Is there one artwork or artist in the book that you think would help readers immediately understand the ideas behind Sinophonecene?? Why?

FK: The work that is partially featured on the book cover and revealed in full in our introduction: “Your are the 0.01%” by Zheng Bo. His outdoor installation’s title refers to the infinitesimal small mattering of humans on earth in terms of her overall biomass, which stands in huge contrast to our destructive impact on the planet. The way these words are literally grown and formed by grass—presenting a living body of plants - as well as formed by the artist’s designing intervention—an aesthetic, anthropocentric gesture of no use to the grass itself, shows the conundrum of a human ecocritical awareness that mostly fails to respond to what is often called the problem of the “Anthropocene”. At the same time, the installation grows on a particular territory—the courtyard of an urban gallery in Hong Kong in 2019—iconically situating the resulting questions for all humanity in a particular Chinese site that commonly grounds the artist as well as the grass, i.e. accounting for a “Sinophone” aspect and human-non-human interrelation, too. 

What is the one idea or question you hope readers take away from this book?

CB, FK, NW: That a pluriversality of times, places and beings matter to our worlding and our limited human capacity to imagine and sustain ways to terrestrial co-habitation. That Sinophone worlds play important roles and actively engaging (with) them helps to address the complexity and scales of the planetary crisis not least mediated through aesthetic practices. That the challenging epistemic boundaries of modernity and related modernisms should not let us keep from trying to know, sense and explore world(s) otherwise insofar as the crisis is rooted in and fueled by problematic, but powerful notions of linear progress, limitless capital accumulation as well as resource extraction and anthropocentrism. That readers ask themselves how they are situated in relation to the planet and what creative energies they might mobilize to address the crisis, when reading about the case studies in our book.