Institute of Critical Zoologists

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The Lines WE DRAW

Introduction

Essay: My surroundings are your reality

Installation View, Yalu River Art Museum

View, Yalu River Art Museum

All images by the ICZ

The Lines WE DRAW

Presented by The Institute of Critical Zoologists

Are the systems we create to understand nature based on the ideals of nature or the ideals of humans?

Do animals respect international boundary lines as we draw up borders and determine which animals belong to which area?

My work investigates the systems humans set up to understand animals. These include categories of local and foreign, invasive and native. These are the lines we draw to organise, classify and control.

On 2nd April 2019, I visited the Yalu River estuary during the migration season with a researcher Mr Bai who spend a good part of his life counting the birds in Dan Dong for the last 10 years. He counted 54,321 birds that day. It took great concentration, skill and passion to keep track of the number of birds that flies in every season, year after year, for the past 10 years. Unfortunately, the numbers are declining every year.

The best time to see the birds are during high tide in the morning. Every time the tide came in, more than 50,000 birds flew up, forming huge murmurations. The forms they created were witnessed by huge crowds of onlookers, who started to see shapes and lines in the murmurations. Sometimes incredible shapes were formed, but I wonder if these patterns were random or intentional. The onlookers could see many shapes and lines I wasn’t able to see.

I tried my best to photograph the lines that the birds drew in the sky.

Background Information on Dan Dong Wetlands

The wetlands in Yalu River, Dan Dong is an important bird migratory site for the godwit and great knot. These birds migrate between New Zealand, China, North Korea and Alaska every year. The migratory flight of the godwit is the longest nonstop migration of any bird in the world. The stop in China and North Korea is an important refueling stop for these birds. As more wetlands and coasts in South Korea and China become concretised, the wetlands in Yalu River remains one of the last sanctuaries for these birds in the world.

Essay by Feng Boyi on the exhibition, click here.

For more information, click here.

The Lines We Draw III (Towards Alaska)