“The Third Nature” Public Art Season

“The Third Nature” Public Art Season is a large-scale public art exhibition about nature, city, humanity, symbiosis and integration, inviting 14 artists from all over the world to explore the relationship among the natural environment, the contemporary city and the human society through installation, video, sound and light and other forms and expressions. Through the beauty of art, we will discover the many possibilities that emerge from the interplay between the first and second nature, and to give birth to a harmonious and orderly urban ecology by blurring the relationship of polarity and opposition. This art season, curated by curator  Honglei Zhang and co-organized by A4X ART CENTER, CPI, and Narture Arts Collective, will open on March 31, 2024, and remain on view until July 7, 2024, at A4X ART CENTER and CPI.

During the Renaissance in the 16th century, Italian humanist scholar Jacopo Bonfadio proposed the concept of “the third nature”, which is different from the native, untouched first nature and the second nature of human intervention and design. It is an existence between the natural environment and the place of human modification, breaking away from the absoluteness of dichotomy and attempting to seek the possibility of intermingling and co-creating, and reaching a new balance in dependence. As humans are also creatures of the first nature, urban development must be sustainable and ecologically resilient at the same time, and further reflection on “how to coexist with nature in the process of urban development” is an important part of building the future social ecology.