Song Chen: Soil Artivism, Ritual Repair, and the Mythic Body

Summary

This episode follows the Shanghai-based artist Song Chen (宋陈), whose practice treats soil not simply as an environmental theme but as a medium, a witness, and a moral problem. Beginning from the premise that urban life is designed to keep soil out of sight, the episode asks what it means to build modern comfort on damaged ground. Song’s early earth-based works, including Dust to Dust and Breakthrough, stage a stark rhythm of burial and emergence, while her Walking Landscape figures imagine the human body as a porous terrain that carries ecological burden rather than mastering it.

The episode then turns to Song’s 2019 World Soil Day exhibition Healing Land in Suzhou, centered on Wounded Soil and the installation Soil Fetus. Here, soil injury is framed as life injury, with reproductive imagery pushing viewers toward responsibility rather than distant concern. Moving between scientific protocols of sampling and classification and mythic imagination through the figure of Nuwa, Song builds an ethics of mending that resists quick fixes. Beyond the gallery, she develops public platforms—forums, education programs, and participatory rituals—that make soil care repeatable, arguing that ecological attention has to be practiced, not just felt.

Keywords
Song Chen, soil artivism, World Soil Day, Healing Land, Wounded Soil, Soil Fetus, soil toxicity, citizen laboratory, Nuwa, mythic repair, ecofeminist resonance, public pedagogy, participatory ritual, ecological literacy, soil biodiversity

Key References 

Arthing (艺术人人网). “宋陈个展：土地频率”Song Chen Solo Exhibition：Land Frequency. 艺术人人网. https://www.arthing.org/archives/2025/12/4850796.html. 2025.

Beijing Art Now Gallery (北京现在画廊). “Breakthrough: Song Chen Solo Exhibition” (破土而出：宋陈个展). http://beijingartnow.com/EnExh_Details.aspx?id=24&model=ew. 2012.

Song Chen 宋陈. “Documentary: Wounded Soil” (纪录片《殇土》). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laSCiDWv-kA&list=PLZtBZjNoH8-_X9xdDahlFEn8N7cmtbZDP. 2019

Song Chen 宋陈. “Dust to Dust” (尘归尘) Series and Collection History. Beijing Art Now Gallery. http://www.beijingartnow.com/EnWorks.aspx?id=30&md=1. 2011.

Song Chen 宋陈. Artist Biography, CV, and Selected Works. Artsy. https://www.artsy.net/artist/song-chen-song-chen/cv. 2025.

SUIS QingPu. “Reviewing Clay Art and Building Awareness of Soil Ecology — Field Trip to Song’s ‘Ecological Chronicle’ at the Xinqiao Art Museum.” https://qingpu-en.suis.com.cn/2022/02/22/reviewing-clay-art-and-building-awareness-of-soil-ecology-a-middle-school-study-field-trip-at-the-xinqiao-art-museum/. 2022.

United Nations. “World Soil Day: Background of the Observance.” https://www.un.org/en/observances/world-soil-day. 2025.

Xinqiao Art Museum (上海新桥美术馆). “Soil Ecology: Song Chen Ecological Art Exhibition” (土壤生态纪：宋陈生态艺术展). https://chuangxin.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202112/09/WS61b1c76ea3107be4979fc435.html. 2021.

My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang

Transcript

You are listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. I am your host, Meiqin Wang, an art historian working in contemporary Asian art and the environmental humanities. In each episode, we explore how Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers use creative, place-based practice to confront social and environmental injustice and cultivate more livable futures. Thank you for joining me. Let us begin.

We begin with something small and ordinary today. If you live in a city, there is a good chance your daily life is designed to keep soil out of sight. Sidewalks, tiles, parking lots, basement garages, elevator lobbies, the sealed floors of shopping malls. Even parks often hold the earth at a distance, contained by edging and irrigation systems that keep things tidy.

And yet soil is still there. It is under the asphalt, inside cracks, packed into construction pits, carried in the dust that settles on a windowsill. It is on the soles of shoes, in the grit near a doorframe, in the particles you only notice when light hits them at a certain angle.

Soil is also in your body, whether you want it there or not. Not as a metaphor, but through food. Even if your lunch came from an industrial supply chain, it still began as an exchange between living organisms and the thin, fragile layer of topsoil that makes agriculture possible. What we pour into land eventually comes back to us.

This episode is about an artist who refuses to let us forget that. Her name is Song Chen (宋陈), born in 1979 in Luoyang and based in Shanghai. For over a decade, she has treated soil not simply as a theme, but as her primary medium: compacted earth, sediment, soil composites, and the traces of damaged land itself.

Her practice asks what it means to live on land that has been treated as disposable. It asks what it means to build a modern life on soil that is polluted, compacted, or extracted. And it asks, quite insistently, whether art can do anything more than mourn. Can art become a method for making soil injury visible, legible, and emotionally undeniable, while also building public habits of care?

One clarification up front. Song is not a soil scientist, and her installations are not technical remediation. What she offers is a visceral relationship to soil, moving through senses, mythic imagination, and public pedagogy.

In other words, Song practices what we might call soil artivism: art that does not stop at representing soil, but tries to reorganize how soil becomes thinkable and feelable in public life. And she does this not only with soil as matter, but with soil as a mythic and ritual substance: something that carries cultural memory, bodily vulnerability, and the question of repair. Ritual matters here because it repeats. It makes attention durable.

Before we get to the major works, it helps to place her briefly. Song’s biographical notes often emphasize her birthplace in the Heluo region around the Luo River and Mangshan Mountain, a symbolic geography frequently invoked as a cradle of Chinese civilization. She studied at Central South University of Forestry and Technology in Changsha and moved to Shanghai in 2003.

Those details matter, but not because birthplace determines destiny. They matter because her practice has been framed as a relationship to earth, not simply as a stylistic choice. She did not come out of a conventional art academy pipeline. Her early career was shaped by self-directed experimentation and a steady commitment to working with materials on the margins of the polished, market-friendly surface.

In Shanghai, a city almost synonymous with speed, construction, and global capital, soil is easy to treat as a nuisance. It is what gets cleared away to make foundations. It is what gets trucked out to make room for concrete. It is what clings to shoes when people arrive at the edge of the metropolis. In that environment, earth is everywhere, but it is rarely granted dignity.

To choose soil as your medium in that context is already an argument. It says: you may want to build upward and outward, but your life is still anchored in the ground. It also says: the ground is not passive. It records histories of use and misuse, and it sets the conditions of possibility for life.

Now let’s move into the early works, because they set the emotional temperature of everything that comes later. Song’s series Dust to Dust, developed around 2009 to 2011, carries an existential tone. The works are thick with compacted earth. Objects and forms appear partially buried, stripped of surface color and returned to the monochrome of soil. She describes the series as removing dazzling distraction and confronting the fact that humans are children of the earth who often fail to cherish each other.

You do not have to agree with that language to recognize what she is doing formally and ethically. Dust to Dust refuses the glossy surface that contemporary art can sometimes fetishize. It pulls everything down, literally. Burial is not presented as peace, but as stripping away, a confrontation with finitude.

Then, in 2012, her installation Breakthrough introduces a different energy. Instead of quiet burial, you see ruptures: cracked soil surfaces that heave upward, forms that push through as if life were insisting on emergence. In her own description, this is about a force that breaks open the crust of habit and control, extending the latitude and longitude of life.

Taken together, these works establish a dialectic that will keep returning in her later practice: return and emergence, death and regeneration, dust and breakthrough.

From there, her Walking Landscape series moves toward a more complex proposition: the body as terrain.

In these works, human torsos are fused with miniature landscapes. Hills, trees, and small architectural forms seem to sprout from shoulders or replace heads. The figure becomes a walking ecosystem, an embodied microcosm.

Many of Song’s soil works have entered museum and foundation collections, and they have also circulated through major art fairs and exhibitions in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere.

This is where we should pause and face a contradiction.

On the one hand, it is easy to say that art fairs are part of a system that turns everything into commodity, including ecological anxiety. On the other hand, Song’s presence in those circuits matters because she brings dirt into spaces designed to exclude it. The fair booth’s clean architecture is forced to share air with soil. The art world’s polished surface is interrupted by the granular, unstable material it would rather keep underfoot.

The Walking Landscape figures also make a specific claim about subjectivity. The body here is not a heroic agent mastering nature. It is porous. It is entangled. It carries a terrain. It is burdened by the world it inhabits.

And if you look closely, these figures are not simply celebrating harmony. Their hybridity can feel uncanny. They suggest that human life has become inseparable from built environments and altered ecologies. The body is not a pure interior, and the landscape is not a pure exterior.

Now the story sharpens, and it sharpens on purpose. The turning point in Song’s practice, at least in terms of explicit ecological address, is her 2019 solo exhibition Healing Land, which opened on World Soil Day, December 5, at True Color Museum in Suzhou.

World Soil Day is not a niche celebration. It is an internationally recognized observance on December 5, supported by the United Nations and led through its Food and Agriculture Organization, intended to raise awareness of soil’s vital role in ecosystems, food security, and biodiversity.

Song anchors her exhibition to that date on purpose. She is not just borrowing the label. She is using the calendar as infrastructure, attaching her work to a public, repeatable rhythm so soil can become a recurring civic concern rather than a one-time aesthetic theme.

The centerpiece of Healing Land is a work titled Wounded Soil, which exists both as an installation and as a documentary film. Over six years, Song traveled to multiple regions to collect samples of what she calls wounded or pathological soil from polluted sites. Those samples were labeled and displayed as specimens. The collected material was also assembled into a large installation called Soil Fetus: an infant-like figure made from soil placed atop a cracked earth mound, suggesting a lifeless womb.

The documentary records the process of traveling, digging, collecting, and assembling. You can imagine the rhythm: arriving, bending down, breaking the crust, feeling the resistance of compacted ground, and then lifting a small amount of earth as if it were evidence. The gesture is simple. The implication is not. The description accompanying the film emphasizes that the Soil Fetus stands for land injured by pollution and human materialism.

This is where Song’s work becomes more direct and more demanding at the same time. The imagery is not ambiguous. It says: soil injury is life injury. And it does not let you stay at the level of environmental concern as a vague feeling. It pushes you toward responsibility. If soil is figured as an infant and a womb, then pollution is not an abstract externality. It is violence against the conditions of future life.

There is a risk here, and we should name it briefly. Reproductive imagery can slide into cliché, especially in environmental discourse. But Song’s work does not feel like sentimental nature worship. It is too harsh for that. The soil figure is not cute. It is precarious. The cracked mound is not a symbol of abundance. It is a sign of rupture.

And because she uses actual soil, including soil gathered from sites marked as damaged, the work also insists on material proximity. You are not looking at a representation of pollution. You are, in a sense, in the presence of it.

If you have seen photographs of the installation, you may notice another layer: the arrangement of specimens, labels, and documentation. This is not just sculpture. It is staged as a kind of forensic theater. Song adopts protocols of sampling and classification, but relocates them within an aesthetic and moral frame. She is not claiming rigorous data. She is building something like a citizen laboratory—an encounter space where ordinary viewers can confront soil toxicity that is usually rendered invisible by expert discourse.

At the same time, Healing Land does not rely only on visceral spectacle. It also includes quieter works such as Ink on Soil and other Soil Ecology pieces that translate microscopic soil textures into abstract compositions. The point is not to aestheticize the microscopic as a beautiful pattern. The point is to make soil legible at different scales, from the monumental cracked womb to the delicate structures of particles and microbial worlds.

This shift of scale matters. One reason modern urban life treats soil as irrelevant is that its most important processes are hidden. Soil biodiversity is not charismatic in the way birds or pandas are. It happens underground, in microbial exchanges and invertebrate activity that rarely appear in public imagination.

By bringing micro-scale textures into a gallery setting, Song is trying to change what counts as visible. She is asking viewers to see soil not as dirt, but as living architecture.

Now let’s shift registers, because Song’s practice does. Alongside soil as damaged matter and soil as scientific object, her work also moves through mythic repair.

In Chinese cultural memory, one of the most enduring narratives about earth and repair is the story of Nüwa, the goddess who shaped humans from yellow earth and later repaired the broken sky. In some versions, she smelts five-colored stones to mend the rupture caused by catastrophic conflict.

Song’s work repeatedly invokes this mythic horizon, not as antiquarian nostalgia, but as a way to ask what repair could mean in a contemporary context where damage is chemical, infrastructural, and systemic. In her hands, repair is closer to mending: a practice that admits the tear and continues anyway.

This is where her approach becomes particularly useful for environmental humanities. Modern environmentalism often relies on two dominant languages: technoscience and policy. Those are necessary. But they do not always reach the level of collective feeling and long-term ethical imagination. Myth can, when used carefully, provide another kind of scaffolding. It can hold together grief, responsibility, and the possibility of mending without promising quick fixes.

At the same time, myth can be dangerous if it smooths over material realities or presents cultural tradition as a substitute for structural change. Song avoids that, I think, because she keeps returning to soil as matter. Her Nüwa-inflected gestures do not float in the sky. They happen in contaminated topsoil and urban construction dust.

This double move, holding science and myth together without collapsing one into the other, is one reason her work resonates with ecofeminist thinking, even though she does not present herself through that label. Ecofeminist scholarship has long argued that ecological destruction is entangled with the exploitation of bodies, care labor, and gendered hierarchies, and it has also pushed for multiple ways of knowing beyond a single technocratic frame.

Song’s soil infant makes that entanglement brutally literal. And her use of Nüwa suggests that repair is not only technical. It is also cultural, ethical, and imaginative.

Now I want to shift away from individual artworks to another dimension of her practice: institution-building.

Over the past several years, she has initiated a Soil Ecology Art Project, a Soil Behavioral Art Festival, and a series of World Soil Day public education programs and forums that bring together artists, soil scientists, environmental engineers, students, and broader publics. These programs are structured less like art talks and more like hybrid classrooms. You get a vocabulary lesson—what soil is, how it degrades, why it matters—alongside artworks that keep the issue from becoming abstract. The result is not consensus. It is sustained attention.

Whether every one of these platforms is large or influential is not the main point. The point is the orientation. Song is not satisfied with the idea that an artwork is a discrete object that circulates through galleries. She treats soil concern as something that has to be built into public rhythms: annual observances, recurring forums, repeated pedagogical events, and accessible science popularization.

In contemporary China, public environmental discourse often gets channeled into state campaigns, corporate sustainability language, or NGO programming. For an artist to build an interdisciplinary platform around soil is to claim that cultural work has a role in shaping ecological literacy. And soil literacy is not optional. Soil is one of the least glamorous foundations of life. Its degradation is slow, often invisible, and deeply consequential. If public attention never settles on it, policy and industry have little incentive to change.

These platforms also spill out into participatory actions. In 2023, a rooftop event at Shanghai’s Yicang Art Museum was described as a Soil Behavioral Art Festival, where participants interacted with soil through digging, molding, and discussion.

I want to linger here because the rooftop matters. In dense urban environments, soil is usually below. It is buried under infrastructure. To bring soil to a rooftop, to make people touch it above the city, is to reverse the usual vertical hierarchy. It is to say: this is not just what supports the city from underneath. This is what the city depends on and is actively destroying.

And then there is the gesture described as Eat Soil Day. On the surface, this sounds absurd or even irresponsible. But as it has been framed in relation to her practice, the phrase functions less as literal instruction and more as provocation. It forces recognition of an uncomfortable fact: we are already eating soil, in the sense that soil quality shapes what enters our bodies through food, water, and air. Contaminated soils do not stay politely underground. They move. They travel. They become intimate.

In this sense, Song’s participatory rituals operate as pedagogy. They do not aim for the grandeur of a mass movement. They aim for a recalibration of attention: making soil present to urban publics who have been trained to treat the ground as inert.

To see how sustained this is, it helps to notice a recent expansion. On December 5, 2025, another World Soil Day, Song opened a large solo exhibition titled Land Frequency, presenting more than sixty works across different periods of her career and organizing them around themes such as natural soil, regional culture, and human behavior.

I mention this because it shows her soil-centered practice is sustained rather than episodic, and that exhibitions have become points of consolidation where early existential soil pieces, later forums, and public pedagogy can be seen as part of one argument.

So what does Song’s soil artivism actually do?

At this point, you might be thinking: this is compelling, but what is the impact?

That is the right question, and it deserves a sober answer.

The impact of a practice like Song’s is not measured by a single policy victory. It is measured by shifts in public imagination and by the building of modest infrastructures that make soil concern repeatable.

Her work does at least four things.

First, it makes soil injury visible through a language that is difficult to ignore. Wounded Soil is not polite. It insists soil degradation is not a technical problem happening somewhere else. It is a crisis of life systems that becomes intimate—bodily, reproductive, intergenerational.

Second, it creates a bridge between scientific attention and everyday feeling. By staging specimens, labels, and documentary processes inside an exhibition, she invites viewers to treat soil as a knowable object without pretending that facts alone will automatically produce care.

Third, it reintroduces cultural and mythic vocabularies of repair without pretending that tradition is a solution. Nüwa becomes a figure of mending, but the mending is grounded in the damaged earth of the present.

Fourth, it builds platforms. Forums, public education events, school sessions, and annual rhythms. These are not glamorous. But they are how ecological concern becomes durable.

At the same time, we should not romanticize her work. There are limits and tensions built into the practice.

One tension is the risk of essentializing soil as an Eastern spiritual substance. Promotional language around her work sometimes leans heavily on phrases like oriental soil culture. That framing can be productive when it insists on non-Western epistemologies, but it can also slide into a marketable exoticism that turns cultural difference into aesthetic branding.

Another tension is the relationship between contamination and display. When an artist brings polluted soil into a public space, that gesture is powerful, but it also raises ethical and practical questions. How is the soil handled? How are risks managed? What does it mean to aestheticize toxicity? Song’s work, as it is publicly described, does not present itself as hazardous material management, and viewers should not assume that artistic display is the same as safe containment. The work operates at the level of witness and moral address, not technical remediation.

A third tension is the scale problem. Soil degradation is planetary, and it is driven by agricultural systems, industrial policy, and extractive development. Art can change attention, but it cannot substitute for systemic change. If Song’s work matters, it is because it helps build cultural conditions in which systemic change becomes imaginable and demanded.

What I find most forward-looking in her practice is precisely that she does not promise miracle healing.

Even in Healing Land, the cracked earth is not repaired. The soil figure remains precarious. The work stays with injury, but it refuses despair. It insists that soil care must be sustained, collective, and intergenerational.

Let me end with an invitation that does not require you to be an artist, a scientist, or an activist.

The next time you have the chance, touch soil. If you have a garden, turn a small patch with your hands. If you do not, find a tree pit on a sidewalk, a planter near a bus stop, a strip of earth at the edge of a parking lot. Notice what it feels like. Is it compacted? Dry? Dusty? Rich? Does it smell alive, or does it smell like nothing at all?

Then ask yourself: what histories are in this soil? What has been poured into it? What has been built over it? What has been taken from it?

And finally: what would it mean to treat this ground not as background, but as a participant in your life, a co-actor in your daily survival?

Song’s work does not give a simple answer. But it does something that feels increasingly urgent in our era of distraction and distance. It reintroduces the ground as a moral and imaginative problem. It makes soil hard to ignore.

If we are serious about livable futures, that is a necessary beginning.

Thank you for listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. If this episode brought someone or some place to mind, I invite you to continue that reflection in your own conversations and practices. You can find a short summary and a few references in the episode description in your listening app. Until next time, take care of yourself, and take care of the places that sustain you.