Connie Zheng

Commissioned by KADIST and Ilham Gallery (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) for exhibition The Plantation Plot, As It Is: Nothing Lasts Forever is a cartographic drawing that diagrams how the earth and its bounty — from plant matter such as tea and rubber to minerals such as lithium and cobalt — have been transmuted into commodities and capital flows that have formed the basis of the global economy and financial markets since the 15th century. This work considers, on a broad level, the ways in which vibrant living worlds in colonized territories have been transformed — and are still being transformed — into vibrant nonliving worlds of finance capital, in a nod to neoliberal policies of codifying more rights for corporations than humans, animals, plants or ecosystems. 

The forms in this work are intended to reference movement, breaking apart, entropy and constant states of change. Its visual language echoes the Theosophic abstract art of the early 20th century, in reference to the spirituality with which contemporary capitalist society has endowed market forces. As part of this project, I re-designed a series of banknotes of major imperial and colonial powers – including the US dollar and $100 bill, British pound, Dutch florin, and Spanish real – by cutting up and collaging my old heirloom seed catalogues, in reference to the *real* wealth that formed the basis of the biggest economies on earth. After printing this ‘alternative’ currency using intaglio — the printing method used to manufacture banknotes — I then cut and reconfigured that currency into floating geometric forms, which populate the ‘night sky’ against which all the formal elements of this work float. The background consists of what The Plantation Plot’s curator Sheau Yun Lim calls a ‘constellational matrix’, a composite of eight cyanotypes based on a 13th-century Chinese star map, interspersed with the ghostly shadows of plants gathered from my mother’s garden.

All of the visual movement in this work comes from references to money, currency, stock exchanges and financial markets, but the usual reference points are flipped. Chinese instead of Greco-Roman constellations; currency based on the bounty of the earth. Handmade instead of matrices of code. An economic system so large as to escape representation and full knowability, yet still rendered through my human hands, with all of their limited capability.

The ‘nodes’ of the diagram at the center of As It Is consist of not just ‘natural resources’ and commodities that formed the basis of colonial empires — including enslaved humans — but also the multinational companies that enriched themselves through the global trade of these so-called commodities and often became more politically powerful than the monarchies that launched them. In a nod to the corporate pillaging of the earth that continues to hollow out the earth, I have also listed major mining operations and the world’s largest multinational corporations on this map. In an echo of the classic Marxist aphorism, “all that is solid turns to air”, this work comments on the ways in which human and more-than-human forms of life continue to be subsumed by endless capitalistic expansion. Yet it also hints at the impermanence and dynamism of institutions and the systems of plunder in which we find ourselves presently embroiled: next to the name of each corporation on this diagram, I have also listed its lifespan — the year of its founding, and its year of its eventual dissolution. Institutions, like matter itself, are ephemeral. Only life remains, in whatever form we may encounter it. 

More detail images forthcoming.