To think of nomadism as a condition of precarity is no longer contemporary. The themes of migration, diaspora, statelessness, and everything encompassed in “leaving behind” in order to “move toward” belong to a flow of displacement that contributes to building a shared, interstitial culture. A reflection on environmental conditions is equally necessary, as is a critical analysis of social conditions, the possibilities of choice that impact quality of life, the sense of frustration in imagining a milder elsewhere, a second New World. Thinking about mobility, and about being mobile not by vocation but by necessity, clearly concerns displacement itself, but often fails to consider the baggage being carried, what is left behind, the unforeseen shock of encountering difference.
Lihong Bai (1999, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China) articulates a set of reflections on contemporaneity through an artistic practice that unfolds into a new body of work after fifteen years of traditional painting. The concept of Shanshui (literally, Mountain-Water), typical of Chinese landscape painting, is revolutionized in the artist’s vision, subverting the stability of the traditional human–nature–landscape conception. Landscape is thus rethought as a mutable condition made of borders, infrastructures, migration, institutions, and environmental resources: a landscape that is not a pre-given background, but a mobile environment.
Movement, displacement, migration, flux: these are all terms that performance art draws on within contemporary art capable of serving as both the field of application and the field of expression for mutability and mobility, it expands and contracts to gather within itself a multitude of meanings, themselves nourished by a shifting, multidirectional surrounding environment. As a series of trajectories intersect at a single point while retaining their future direction and their traced path, the body becomes the material of accumulation, a living archive in perpetual transformation.
[ . . . ]
The concern for a desertifying landscape (according to the 2026 National Desertification Atlas, 81.9% of Mongolia’s territory is now affected by desertification and soil degradation, five percentage points higher than in 2020), for the disappearance of ancient traditional practices such as the use of medicinal herbs, animal sacrifice, and the interpenetration of human being and landscape, and for the awareness of a fragile, inevitable gap between memory and learning, take shape in these projects as funerary symbols, as combustion, as pulverization in the return to the earth of a material and conceptual ash that becomes part of the larger environment to which it belongs. To burn medicinal herbs is to burn the memory of millennia-old traditions (Compendium of Materia Medica); just as collecting the remains of animals offered in sacrifice according to ancient customs is a reflection on death as a circular process. Bai lends symbolism and the dignity of memory to her personal archive of experience, bringing to her work a ruthless environmentalist critique, a sensitive gaze turned toward the self, and a destabilizing provocation aimed at established, immobile, stagnant social structures.
For Bai, urbanization, desertification, metamorphosis, travel, and reciprocity are not merely political questions, but experiential actions that move with her, radiating outward from wherever she happens to be, across past, future, personal and collective time, within an artistic language that detaches itself from the technical sense of “practice” and finally becomes experiential act and lived experience within the contemporary.
Carrying the Land Home
Nomadism and Mobility on Lihong Bai’s body
Chiara Causo
