From pandemic gardening to street murals featuring seeds of change, the humble seed is seeing a resurgence of popular interest in the United States. Yet the seed is a millennia-old motif of both survival and colonization, with expanded meanings for the strange new era of the present—a time characterized by cascading climate catastrophes, stark racial and economic inequity, violent ideological polarization, media pollution, and xenophobia. Drawing from film, contemporary art, mythology, natural science, popular culture, propaganda, and other sources, this visual lecture will explore some old and new ways in which biomatter has embodied humans’ hopes for survival and fears of contamination, as well as divergent possibilities for radical counter-narratives to racialized, neoliberal formulations of climate apocalypse.

Zheng is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Oakland who draws heavily upon methods of assemblage and recontextualization. Past and upcoming exhibitions include presentations at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and AIR Gallery in New York. She received a master’s in art practice from UC Berkeley and bachelor’s degrees in economics and English from Brown University, and she is currently a first-year PhD candidate in visual studies at UC Santa Cruz.

This event is presented by UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice and the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Series.