Xin Cheng: Art as permaculture and localist utopia

Xin Cheng’s art is closer to permaculture and an open-handed survivalism than contemporary art culture. She practises sustainable horticulture and numerous crafts, curates salads and collates muesli recipes, photographs sausage-curing wires and portable cooking stations and records different designs for bivouacs and road-side petrol vending stands – all as if outside the greedy purview of contemporary art. She gathers unwanted things like an urban beachcomber, while teaching and talking about making do and doing more with less. Although her interest in any physical system is never reducible to that system’s solely aesthetic appeal, Xin also collects real and photographed textures, variegated surfaces of the material world as patterns and indices of change. She advocates necessary protections for a world that, paradoxically, precedes and outlasts all human initiatives.