邊界
biānjiè research group

邊界_RG its an artist collective and a research group. They work at the edge of language, memory, and machine cognition. Their collaboration explores the aesthetics of the recursive interplay between generative systems, speculative design, experimental essay...(learn more)

biome

home about profiles publications artworks events join us donate open call

desert

cybernetics language memory interface digital culture new media LLMs learn more...

mail x instagram

open call for publication / open until SEP.1

Design in Rising Winds
Flora Weil
28.07.2025.PAR.FRA

publications Ecology Carbon markets Gamification Geo-Engineering Planetary Infrastructure
HAIID Assemblage Theory Chinese Cosmology Policy Governance

The following text was written as part of the tenth and last M+ Museum and Design Trust Fellowship which I had the chance to receive in 2023. The research below spanned from summer 2023 to winter 2025 and involved multiple return trips to China’s greening deserts. The outcomes of this fellowship include a digital atlas and divination map, as well as this research article shared here as a preview ahead of its full publication.

Atlas Website: SN1006 & Benjamin Reynolds
Research, Design, Curation: Flora Weil
Atlas Contributors: Wendi Yan, Rundong Zhao, Yin Fahua, Isaac Levine, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Connor Cook, Maria F. Pello, Libby Jennifer, Adnan Naqvi, Wenxin Zhang, Laura Cugusi, Roman Shemakov, Flora Weil.

A sincere thank you to Ruishan Chen for introducing me to his family and for guiding me along the contours of his personal story, one that traces the trajectory of incomparably generous and resolutely rising desert winds.

APNEA

There is a speed at which air cuts your breath. Above a certain velocity, the physical pressure against your airways makes inhalation impossible– asphyxiation caused by an excess of air, a moment where sky becomes wall. We have in many ways crossed this threshold. In the two last years since this research project began, reality has compressed into something increasingly suffocating. We scroll through genocide between numbing recession notifications. We are forced to optimize our productivity while statistical intelligence replaces our cognitive functions. In between our lack of agency against existential technologies¹ and extinction, we are caught in a kind of civilizational apnea. Each breath brings more than our lungs were designed to process. The title of this project, “Design in Rising Winds”, contains its own atmospheric contradiction. For years, scientific research has documented a phenomenon known as global “stilling”² - a decrease in surface wind speeds across land areas worldwide due to climate change. As carbon dioxide levels rise, the planet’s winds are, as a matter of fact, declining. Yet, how is it that the world seems to be spinning faster, with many of us struggling to catch our breath, unable to reconcile our intimate rhythms with the turbulent pace of societal change? This paradox—between stilling and acceleration—is where this project begins: not in resolution, but in contradiction. What does it mean to design in a world where we find ourselves gasping for air? What forms, systems, relations, and movements might we design to survive this velocity? Where do we find those who have learned to breathe differently?

Fig. 1- Abandoned Structure in Taklamakan Desert

The traditional Chinese character for wind (風) offers a tentative insight, containing at its center the character for bug (虫) – a reminder that the smallest beings can shape planetary forces. These nested characters became, in a way, a foundation for this sprawling project that turns towards phenomena hidden in China’s poorest³ and driest provinces to reimagine what design means in an age of increasing complexity. Through fieldwork stretching from Gansu to Inner Mongolia, this research took place within an unusual landscape defined by both extreme environmental control and creative acts of adaptation, where design takes new forms as dust storms, ecological governance, and gamified terraforming merge in an ambitious project of weather engineering. Design in Rising Winds examines ecologies transformed by Chinese geoengineering experiments, where people, organisms, technologies–often deemed peripheral– actually recompose the planet’s atmosphere.

This work owes gratitude to anthropologist Jerry Zee, whose research on this very region’s “particulate dynamics”⁴ revealed how desert winds “create experimental worlds”⁵. In his ethnography on strange Chinese weather, Zee describes how “late socialism”⁶ exists in a state of tension between “meteorological derangement and meteoric economic growth,”⁷ where dust becomes “a material condition that gives traction to unexpected configurations of relating, breathing, and governing in the twenty-first century”.⁸

Where Zee illuminates the politics of Chinese dust and wind, this project extends the inquiry into the age of gamified carbon markets, rural influencers, and platform infrastructure. The mechanisms he describes and those explored in this research have been evolving for over four decades as part of the Three-Norths Shelterbelt (三北)– more commonly known as the Great Green Wall–a massive afforestation and dust storm management initiative launched in 1978 to urgently combat desertification and smog events that originated as sandstorms in the Chinese desert. Known by neighboring nations as “yellow dust,”⁹ these sand storms were so significant that they posed the threat of what Jerry Zee calls “a becoming-Chinese of planetary atmosphere.”¹⁰ Today, this weather engineering program has mutated into something stranger, more fractal– incentivized by gamified consumer campaigns, dispersed across social media content, and stretching well beyond infrastructural vegetation, economic policies, and planned migrations. It has become a vast apparatus that blurs the boundaries between nature, human, and technology, extending into the less definable territories of desire, identity, anxiety, and collective imagination.

This blurring is no accident, but is the direct result of how ecological governance has become central to Chinese nation-building. When the term “ecological civilization” (生态文明) was written into the party constitution in 2012, it became a key pillar of how the state expresses power, marking on the international stage the beginning of a distinctly Chinese version of modernity, where economic growth and ecological preservation reinforce rather than exclude each other. This notion has taken such an omnipresent role in Chinese governance that it has come to articulate everything, from social progress to national aesthetics in relation to ecology. Many of the interlocutors and infrastructures encountered throughout this project are in fact part of what President Xi established as the Beautiful China Initiative¹¹ (美丽中国), “an explicitly aesthetic component of ecological civilization building”¹², which equates the term “beauty” with a measurable outcome of effective governance. In 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences even created a Beauty Index¹³ tabulating the level of “beauty” attained nationally, which could be quantified through high quality education, welfare, and institutions designed to be engineered. This idea of ecology, and by extension nature, as something that requires synthesizing and optimizing, is a perspective rooted in the cybernetics era where reform era scientists framed China as a series of interconnected systems that could be continuously modeled and improved. The conceptual history of this highly integrated theory of social-natural management is something that scientists traced to classical Chinese cosmology.¹⁴ In expressing earth systems science in relation to China’s multi millennial history, they contributed to the aestheticization of ecology, which framed “modern techniques of functional land use zoning and socio-environmental modeling as aligned with classical Chinese philosophical precepts.”¹⁵ In the decades that followed, ecosystem engineering coupled with administrative planning precipitated nationwide projects aimed at a range of policies from urbanizing the masses to deploying the Belt and Road plan.

Fig.2 - Green Development Beauty Index and Other Systems Science Models

In addition to becoming a legitimizing force for China’s governance strategies, the idea of an “ecological civilization” was accepted as a “historically inevitable”¹⁶ stage of the socialist project, widely theorized and circulated¹⁷ in the years leading to the 2008 Olympics. This was also the period that marked the beginning of one of the most dramatic economic transformations in modern history, during which China joined the WTO, completed the Three Gorges Dam, overtook the United States as the largest foreign investment recipient¹⁸, established itself as the world’s factory, and implemented experimental market reforms that enabled unprecedented “economic modernization without significantly changing its one-party political system.”¹⁹ In her examination of alternative economies to neoliberalism in the context of cultural production, curator Mi You observes how “over time, state capacity proved not only to be the driving force of economic rebuilding, but was targeted increasingly to address social equity; examples include state-sponsored poverty alleviation programs which have effectively eradicated absolute poverty (measured against a standard equivalent of $2.30 per day in rural areas)”²⁰. What made much of this aggressive reform period generally accepted by the Chinese public were these concrete improvements in living standards and the legacy of socialism that enabled mechanisms like land financing –a consequence of collective land ownership that gave “the ability to use land as collateral to mobilize markets.”²¹ These configurations matter because they ultimately suggest we might be asking the wrong questions. As philosopher Benjamin Bratton observes, “fear of technology, which has been endemic to Western culture for at least a couple of hundred years, has now become fear of China.”²² As I’ve learned throughout this project, understanding how technological transformations unfold on the ground can help see past these conflations and point towards more useful questions about what constitutes a “viable planetarity”²³.

China's approach to both its economy and ecology reflect perhaps how neither was ever a problem of politics, but instead, a problem of governance. It surprisingly refuses containment within familiar binaries—neither purely capitalist nor socialist, neither ecological nor developmental, neither entirely authoritarian nor neoliberal.²⁴ As Mi You succinctly states, “ the ontological question of whether China is neoliberal or not is less pertinent than how and when China is neoliberal.”²⁵ This refusal to be categorized, while still maintaining the capacity to plan with deliberate direction, doesn't just manifest at the top-down level of state policy. As I learned throughout this project, it permeates multiple scales of Chinese life. The same tactical incoherence that allows China to be simultaneously the world's largest carbon emitter and leader in renewable energy manifests in the daily improvisations of those living within its weather engineering programs. Just as the state deploys ecology as both control mechanism and beauty standard, so too do China's citizens learn to breathe within and against these systems. What follows is an attempt to trace these movements: to learn from those who navigate contradiction not as a problem to be solved, but as the very medium through which reorientation becomes possible.

INVERTED BREATH

Certain desert plants practice a form of inverted breathing. They open stomata during nights to capture CO₂, then close during daylight while releasing stored CO₂ internally. The process splits photosynthesis into two temporal phases to minimize water loss in extreme heat.²⁶ This metabolic reversal offers an unexpectedly accurate diagram for understanding Chinese ecological governance, which similarly operates by separating what elsewhere appears indivisible. China’s approach to ecology is simultaneously open and closed, transparent and opaque—inhaling market mechanisms in one moment and exhaling state control in the next.

The term "strategic transparency"²⁷ emerged from research on Chinese carbon markets co-led by political ecologist Annah Zhu, whom I had the chance to travel with across Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. "China’s environmental governance model–regularly considered to be a key example of authoritarian environmentalism–instead represents an evolving mixture of liberal and illiberal tactics," she writes. The irony is striking. Carbon markets–fundamentally neoliberal instruments requiring public accountability to function–find their only consequential expression²⁸ today in China's authoritarian system, through a kind of "graduated sovereignty". In other words, a governance system “wherein market techniques are deployed selectively in certain areas in the pursuit of economic growth and guided by a powerful state”.²⁹ During a lunch meeting at an afforestation site, we find ourselves sitting across a surprising trio of old friends: a coal mine owner, the local airport manager, and a celebrated tree planting laborer. The scene perfectly depicts China’s eco-developmental³⁰ paradox–where carbon extraction, monetization, and sequestration sit at the same table. “None of this is greenwashing exactly,” Annah observed, “they just believe in a model that appeals more to the Global South.” It takes a certain form of precarity to move beyond the luxury of ideological purity and metabolize the incompatible into opportunity.

This strategic ambiguity manifests most saliently in Ant Forest, Alibaba’s carbon credit app integrated within the payment system Alipay, which has already mobilized over 700 million users³¹ and translates low-carbon consumer habits into desert afforestation programs. Sand fixating desert shrubs planted through the accumulation of green energy points become visible to a panopticon of users watching the landscape transform through their phones. Most effectively, a powerful imaginary of China’s greening deserts materializes at the threshold between land restoration and fintech. In a way, inverted breathing achieves its most hallucinogenic form when mundane activities–walking to work, paying bills, buying certain products–translate into landscapes that feel more real as a collective belief than as they actually do on site. Perhaps we're witnessing the Earth's latest evolutionary experiment. In think tank Antikythera’s words, “the planet has folded itself into the human prefrontal cortex”.³²

Fig. 3 - Ant Forest Site Near Dunhuang

Operating outside official carbon markets, the platform's energy points exist in a fascinating regulatory void. Each point theoretically represents one gram of carbon reduction, calculated through proprietary algorithms³³, yet these points cannot be traded, sold, or used for compliance. This allows Ant Forest to prioritize engagement over carbon accounting, reaching a scale that formal systems cannot achieve. Somehow, in this contorted but effective nationwide terraforming project, the platform successfully harnessed the attention economy to engineer one of the largest behavioral change experiments. Gamification elements include point accumulation, achievement badges, rankings, and the unique “energy stealing” mechanic where users can claim uncollected energy from friends’ accounts. Unlike usual carbon credit services which emphasize individual responsibility, Ant Forest leverages relationship networks. In Ant Forest, users actively adopt strategies to outperform each other. Almost all of these strategies, except for walking, depend exclusively on the products and services offered by Alibaba.

The psychological mechanisms of platform capitalism reflect how gamification can “simultaneously index and and drive the development of neoliberalism”³⁴ where one is encouraged to be in perpetual competition in order to develop value. As Patrick Jagoda explains in his analysis of the conjunction of neoliberalism and games, “the competition, repetition, and quantified objectives that make up gamified designs, in both entertainment and applied games, correspond with some of the most pernicious aspects of advanced capitalism.”³⁵ Yet Ant Forest complicates this critique. As Bratton notes, “Many of the things that we might observe as most troubling about the Chinese model of the internet are not things that are necessarily driven by the short-term quarterly profit demands of Tencent or Alibaba, they’re driven by the demands of the state”.³⁶ Here, commercial gamification serves long-term ecological planning. Self-tracking becomes weather engineering. The question isn't whether this is surveillance, but whether surveillance can photosynthesize, prevent dust storms, maintain diplomatic relations, and contribute to more desirable planetary conditions. What is sadly most impressive, from the perspective of someone who grew up in the West like me, is the faith that nearly a billion users have in an app’s ability to deliver such large-scale promises. Whether this is coming from a genuine sense of trust, national pride, or simply a lack of options, the intertwinement of platforms with long-term state objectives has produced an underlying sense that Chinese commercial technology is, in a way, publicly owned. Take the example of DeepSeek, China’s LLM model that has gained meteoric traction against all odds, which is setting open-source AI to become the global standard.³⁷ As hyperstition³⁸ takes new low-carbon forms, companies like Alibaba have become providers of planetary infrastructure, taking on the role of “geopolitical actors imbued with informational power and national security value”³⁹ that govern at the scale of weather itself.

Fig. 4 - Cistanche Harvesting in Western China

In a recursive and dislocated way, this system echoes alternative visions of "mass culture, collectivity, and computation"⁴⁰ conceived when China first encountered cybernetics through scientists like Qian Xuesen—whose legacy spans from missile programs to the one-child policy.⁴¹ His proposal for an "Open Complex Giant System" imagined computation as a symbiotic human-machine intelligence exploring how we might "think of a human mass that has agency?"⁴² He couldn't have foreseen super-apps, but his belief that technology could amplify human potential—especially through qigong and traditional Chinese medicine—has materialized in unexpected ways. Perhaps most prescient was his prediction that the "sixth revolution would come from advances in the sand industry,"⁴³ including solar energy, desert-adapted species, and desertification management. China is now experiencing a boom in its traditional medicine market, where desert farmers are increasingly turning to the cultivation of medicinal herbs, with local enterprises spearheading efforts to transform these crops into what various media outlets are now calling “green gold” (绿色黄金).⁴⁴ Central to this transformation is the mechanism of “order-based farming” (订单种植)—where companies such as Canghe Agricultural Technology (苍禾农业科技有限公司) work closely with local farmers to cultivate herbs like Jingjie (荆芥), Cangzhu (苍术), and Banxia (半夏) to demand, building "secure contracts" (定心丸) that stabilize precarious livelihoods. These plants are now experiencing a renaissance, driven by growing global interest in traditional knowledge and a strong domestic market for herbal remedies. Most remarkable is the parasitic plant Cistanche (肉苁蓉), which grows on the roots of state-planted sand-fixing shrubs. Once rare, it now generates up to 30% of local income in some counties. Here, ecological infrastructure becomes an economic scaffold—a parallel market composed of hosts and parasites. Just as desert plants host rhizomes and split photosynthesis across time to survive desert conditions, China's ecological governance thrives through temporal inversion–stretching our respiratory systems from apps to dunes, from ancient medicine to planetary technology.

SEASONAL HOWLS

At the junction of the Gobi Desert where the Great Wall ends and the Great Green Wall emerges, a landscape of monstrous rock formations stretches into the horizon where there once was a sea. Instead of tides, sonic anomalies now traverse the landscape, producing a howling sound when wind blows through this mineral architecture. Locals call this "Demon City" (魔鬼城) where landscapes come to life in the shape of a sonic monster. Perhaps meaning does not come from predictability, but from anomaly. Insight, interpretation, innovation, despite their pretensions to rationality, have after all, often been practices of productive hallucination.

Further north in Inner Mongolia, another unlikely natural infrastructure emerges, this one built as a response to ecological governance policies. In order to control sandstorms, widespread grazing bans have been mandated, which can last up to 10 years to allow sand-fixing grass to regrow. This is a policy that particularly affects ethnic Mongolian pastoralists whose livelihoods depend on herding goats. Rather than simply enforcing the ban, local cooperatives developed an inventive compromise: seasonal hydroponics warehouses, communally operated by multiple farm families. This temporary, seasonal infrastructure, installed in the community's largest goat farms, produces soilless grass that allows herders to feed their goats during the 45-day period when natural grasslands need to regenerate. Locals call this the "herd kindergarten," where farmers can rotate their goats to graze on fresh grass throughout the ban period. It takes just 8 days to produce about one ton of grass, enough to feed 400 sheep, while the greatest challenge becomes preventing grass mould—a service economy where new kinds of labor, new models of collective ownership, and new technical knowledge materialize. As one might often notice in rural China, the system transforms policy restriction into profit. Herders can now sell their livestock twice a year instead of once, since the hydroponics-grown grass fattens their goats faster than traditional grazing and doesn't depend on rainfall. The goats gain 10% of their weight on the hydroponics grass, and most importantly, the herders understand that their leverage lies in collectivity—they are able to finance such large infrastructure (around 200,000 RMB) through a system they call the "collective economy" (集体经济).

Fig. 5 - Seasonal Hydroponics in Inner Mongolia

China has perhaps always been receptive to seasonal rhythms—early sinologists like Marcel Granet identified rhythm and resonance as organizing principles in Chinese thought. But who could have imagined this manifesting as warehouses filled with soilless grass? There seems to be no idea too strange to realize in a country that treats scaling as a craft. What strikes me still most is not the technology itself, but the ease with which it can be scaled. Consider that viral video of a Chinese railway station built in nine hours.⁴⁵ Although it surely conjured a strange sense of wonder and alarm, it was the result of extreme standardization and modular prefabrication. Chinese high-speed rail stations are known for using publicly accessible blueprints of standardized designs, enabling consistent implementation across vast territories.

This same systematic approach allowed it to capture 80% of global solar manufacturing capacity.⁴⁶ This ability to scale reaches back millennia to irrigation systems like Dujiangyan, which used channeling instead of damming, later standardized and replicated across river ecosystems during the Han and Tang dynasties. China’s persistence over the last five millennia is often attributed to its mastery in water management. Indeed, “it is no coincidence that the Chinese character for "to govern" (治) contains the radical for water.”⁴⁷ Even the Three-Norths Shelterbelt exemplifies adaptive scaling: species of shrubs are selected based on their adjustment to hyper-local conditions. The notion of "experimentation under hierarchy"⁴⁸ captures this approach: local authorities test innovations while maintaining central oversight, with successful experiments adopted nationally through systematic policy learning. This creates what researchers call "fragmented authoritarianism"—clear hierarchical authority combined with horizontal coordination and considerable interpretive space.⁴⁹ Direct state communications often read like poetry when taken literally–their ambiguity, perhaps intentional, allow multiple interpretations within a single directive.

"You just need the stamp of approval from the government, and it will be everywhere," our local Mongolian guide, Saanagar, tells us. These seasonal hydroponics were interestingly initiated by a foreign NGO, The Nature Conservancy, the same organization that calculates carbon for Ant Forest. Their motto contains three values: non-confrontational, science-based, and site-based. Invited by Jiang Zemin in 1998, they've navigated increasing restrictions— geolocation data, once freely shared, is now difficult to access. It is easy to forget that environmental innovations often surpass what state initiatives achieve alone. As we drive through the barren landscapes of Hohhot, an eerie sense of suspension pervades. Even the scientist in our team pauses by a large tree: "I am a scientist, but I swear in the summer, the climate is different around this tree." Our driver shares local stories—Mongolians believe the wind turbines have caused the rain to stop, that mining companies shoot clouds to disperse them. Fiction and science intertwine and their difference dissolves in this landscape.

At the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental Research Institute in Lanzhou, scientists develop experimental infrastructure across the Great Green Wall, intervening directly in the relationship between wind and sand. Professor Benli Liu guides me through his lab's experiments, where his team deploys solutions along high-speed rails, monuments, and urban infrastructure. They elevate tracks above dunes, plant smart species, automate grass grid installation, and use sand-hardening bacteria. “All other scientific disciplines look for similarity,” he tells me. “Math, chemistry, physics—these all look for similar patterns to find solutions to problems. But geomorphology looks for the differences within nature. The more details, the more differences you know about, the more you can find the conditions to adjust.” This attention to difference becomes a practice in itself, as each challenge requires its own unique response. The landscape Professor Liu works with defies conventional scientific approaches. It behaves in often incoherent ways that demand constantly evolving solutions and an approach that is counterintuitive by necessity. According to researcher Isaac Levine, "the issue is that when trying to model something like mudslides or how dunes change, it is unclear whether sand acts more like a liquid or a solid; sand generally exhibits the properties of both, making it difficult to model computationally."

Fig.6 - CAREERI Visit in Lanzhou

What might we learn from materials that refuse our models? Nora Khan proposes thinking of AI as "as a primordial force of nature, like a star system or a hurricane — something strong, but indifferent."⁵⁰ Perhaps sand offers another metaphor: intelligence as that which slips between categories, accumulating into new forms through its very resistance to capture. As Catherine Malabou states, "Intelligence 'is' not; rather, it only exists through its own transformations."⁵¹ These demon cities and herd kindergartens show us perhaps that notions that have come to define our species–intelligence, evolution–emerge precisely from where our models fail. What might science look like when it mirrors the incoherent, the unsound, and the anomalous? In a project describing future human-AI interactions, researchers note that what is most important “is an acceleration and an intensification of the parts of scientific progress that are not scientific, that are irrational, demonstrating that what science is is not the extension of knowledge, but the intensification of the irrational and the exuberant, behind which knowledge follows, but only at a distance.”⁵²

In a way, the howling heard near Yardan National Park is produced by a geologic error found at the microscopic scale of a grain of sand where air cavities have continuously formed and reconfigured, much like China, over the course of millennia. This uneven surface structure has been molded into resonating chambers that amplify vibrations and create a low-frequency sound that can be heard when winds blow. Dust has a dampening effect on sound production, meanwhile the amount of sand in the air has reduced over time due to environmental efforts, causing seasonal howls to have reversely become louder, reverberating to the rhythm of the planet's respiration.

CARBON LARP

To understand China is to understand that reality itself is often performed into being. In the context of this project, this performativity seemed to saturate every scale—from state pageantry to the construction of a rural identity by netizens. The state has merged national aesthetics into ecological goals, creating what can only be described as a widespread desire to align with the identifiers of an ecological civilization. The notion of model laborers (劳动模范) exemplify this process: grassroots heroes who have contributed to socialist construction through ecological efforts. Wang Youde (王有德) is one such figure who planted over a million desert shrubs by hand across three decades. He is one of six such individuals recognized for contributing to the Great Green Wall’s long-term efforts. Each model laborer now has a dedicated museum, their stories embedded into party narrative—examples of the post-industrial Chinese citizen defined through multi-generational ecological labor.

At Wang’s commemoration site⁵³, the careful curation of state memory manifests through photographs of laborers planting trees alongside President Xi and a ceremonial shovel preserved in a glass case with its red bow. A 2019 presidential tree-planting ceremony has become iconography, replicated across similar sites. Driving through Northwestern China, I'm struck by the performative coherence of Chinese identity—perhaps unsurprising for the world's longest continuous state. As we pass a mining area covered with a banner that reads "保护环境" (“protect the environment”), the contradiction nearly feels less jarring than it might elsewhere. Could it be that what is different here is how performativity is mobilized as a kind of social technology, one that creates feedback loops between aspiration and action, beyond what is coerced? As Deng Xiaoping admitted, "We no longer know what socialism is, or how to get there, and yet it remains the goal."⁵⁴

While the state drives ecological transformation through top-down planning, rural inhabitants perform their own variations through what geographer Jesse Rodenbiker calls "counter-conduct"—a term for how individuals navigate, resist, and reinterpret governmental processes. According to Rodenbiker, citizens not only “internalize ecological expressions of power,” but “produce a rural-ecological sublime for their own socioeconomic benefit as they navigate uneven displacement from land and housing, and to maintain senses of their rural past.”⁵⁵ This is particularly visible in the idea of nongjiale (农家乐)—rural-themed venues—which have proliferated across China, offering “rural” experiences for urban tourists seeking an authentic countryside life. During my fieldwork, I stayed in a desert village named “Picking Stars Town” (摘星小镇), where nature and nostalgia merge into a carefully staged form of touristic consumption. Our rooms are geodesic domes set up next to a sculpture park that rises above the neighboring afforestation site. In these spaces, rural entrepreneurs reshape the narrative of their displacement by presenting rural culture as both futuristic and primitive ecology, or by portraying rural people as multigenerational stewards of the environment. By deploying these symbolic elements, villagers navigate displacement on their own terms, transforming rural dispossession into a source of socioeconomic agency.

Fig.7 - Network of Organic Desert Farmers in Wuwei

Among these is Yin Fahua (尹发华), nicknamed Huahua (花花) or “Little Flower”—an organic wheat farmer who guided me across Gansu multiple times over two years. His cousin Ruishan Chen (陈睿山), a key collaborator on this project and vice dean of Shanghai Jiaotong University's Design School, introduced us. Ruishan's own trajectory traces an improbable arc: from a still barely accessible mountaintop in Gulang county as the child of climate migrants, to prominent geographer and academic. As I followed the contours of their personal story, I had the chance to meet a network of organic farmers scattered across Wuwei county. Huahua and his wife Liu Rui (刘瑞), nicknamed Shitou (石头) or “Little Stone”, run a noodle factory and grow a specific variety of drought-resistant wheat in the desert. “Just like us Northwestern people, it is tough and simple,” says Shitou.⁵⁶ In order to make their commitment to chemical-free agriculture work, they established the Gulang County Yangui Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Professional Cooperative (古浪县雁归农牧专业合作社), focused on transitioning their village to ecological practices. Their noodle brand Yan Gui Qing (雁归情) now reaches customers through WeChat and livestream channels, generating over 2 million RMB annually—yet they distribute 75,000 RMB yearly to their village's collective economy, ensuring shared prosperity. For three months, Little Flower sent me daily messages—glimpses of his daily desert life. "Took a rarely taken path across the dunes," reads one text. "Just keep farming," says another. Through these mundane moments, I sense that for Huahua, organic desert farming isn't a choice made in spite of the profession’s impossibility, but out of tenderness for its difficulties.

The platformization of Chinese society is also something that opens unexpected stages for rural reinvention. On Kuaishou, the short-form video content platform where rural content dominates⁵⁷, creators like 毛道長 (Mao Daozhang) or “Master Mao” share daily sustainable farming techniques and manifestos, transforming daily farmer life into influencer content. His bio reads: "从生态有机农业中探寻健康密码, 让生存环境变的更美" (Explore health through ecological organic agriculture, make the living environment more beautiful). Rural creators like him use platforms to build mutual support systems, market products collectively, share new techniques, and pool resources. In Mao Daozhang's network alone, farmers funded an organic school and hospital. When a fellow farmer fell into debt, his WeChat group raised 5 million RMB in just a few days. Kuaishou amplifies this through campaigns—the hashtag "my daily rural routine" garnered 9.6 billion views in a month. This substantial focus on agriculture underscores Chinese platforms’ roles as spaces where rural lifestyles are prominently featured and celebrated. Yet these digital expressions of rurality are more than mere performance. Despite choosing one of the hardest professions there can be, these organic desert farmers have transformed social media into networks of algorithmic solidarity and managed to not only reverse their marginalization, but create new forms of collectivity, rarely seen in contemporary China.

Fig.8 - Xiao Yan in Desert Neighboring Dunhuang

As political scientist Iza Ding observes, "If everything is performative, then nothing is performative."⁵⁸ Perhaps no one embodies this more completely than Yan Yongzhe (闫勇哲) who became my Dunhuang fixer. Working since the age twelve, he knows every secret path into the dunes despite the surrounding desert being strictly closed off by the government for environment protection. Like many locals, he contributed to building most of the infrastructure we drive by: solar panel fields, afforestation sites, military bases. His life has involved circumventing barriers both physical and bureaucratic, practicing an “art of pretending to be governed”⁵⁹ while shifting between a multitude of professions and identities. "The desert is like the world to us," he tells me, "I never take the same path through the dunes because it changes every time I come back." Rural social governance aiming to simultaneously restore and extract from the environment has turned the region into state-sponsored uncertainty. Inhabitants creatively adapt to the government’s confusing directives. One day they’re a farmer, the next an oil rigger, one day they’re a driver, the next a tree planter. The world is never held still, but moves through unpredictable bursts of economic opportunity. In this perpetual carbon roleplay, I recognize a glimpse of what we’re all becoming: identities that fracture and flow, against the backdrop of virtual beings that can now adopt countless personas while processing text. We are already constantly performing our own identities, no longer bound to singular forms–most often out of necessity, and sometimes, simply because “who we are matters less than how agency manifests.”⁶⁰

DHIKR

The themes of this project found their most powerful expression on my last research trip to Dunhuang, where I encountered a hidden cemetery in Fei Tian Park, an eco-tourism site recently constructed in the city's center. Behind metal gates that happened to be open that day, the burial ground belongs to the Hui ethnic minority. Surrounded by a forest, these graves mark the site of a former mosque around which the community used to gather and live. When the government's ecological project demanded their relocation, the Hui agreed to move everything except their dead. In an environment of continuous movement, these tombs are the only things that have remained static, yet they ultimately represent a long story of migration. There is a passage from The Graves of Tarim that artist Adnan Naqvi once shared which has stayed with me since: “In a society of migrants, what is important is not where you were born, but where you die. This, if nothing else, makes diaspora entirely different from a nation.”⁶¹ For the Hui and many diasporic people, identity is shaped not by birthplace, but by chosen resting place–a testament to an experience of movement that remains situated, grounded to the world. I learned that the Hui, Gansu's largest ethnic minority, are known for blending Sufi and Taoist practices, a form of philosophical movement I had not encountered before. Within their tradition exists a striking particularity in the practice of dhikr, the repetitive invocation amongst muslim rituals that turns rhythmic breathing itself into a form of prayer. There are two Hui factions that each practice dhikr in a different way. The Jahriyya or “Loud Ones” practice dhikr aloud, their voices carrying as far as they can. The Khyufiyya or “Silent Ones” do this while whispering, almost remaining silent, their words concealed– perhaps, like the desert plants that breathe backwards, they too are conserving moisture as a form of evolutionary adaptation. This split between vocal and quiet dhikr mirrors what I’ve been tracking throughout this project–how survival under chaotic conditions requires both performance and concealment, both scalable solutions and attunement to anomaly, both theatrical staging and genuine belief. To be simultaneously moving and still, peripheral and central like those who compose the infrastructure of the planet’s lungs while remaining at its edges. Maybe Earth performs its own dhikr through these respiratory cycles.

Fig.9 - Hui Cemetery in Fei Tian Eco-park

When I first began this project, I believed I was searching for answers that could match the scale of planetary challenges that are faced not only by this particular region but, given our climate trajectory, eventually by us all. Instead, I found myself moving in the opposite direction. Regular visits with Huahua and Xiao Yan, time spent in places like this cemetery, taught me to be sensitive to a different kind of movement–one that begins with inhabiting contradictions, with locating movement from within. Rather than trying to define an increasingly ungraspable world, Design in Rising Winds draws inspiration from the entrepreneurial collectives, mutating ecologies, and experimental infrastructures, where design becomes a form of daily negotiation at every scale. Like the phenomena that it studies, this project requires multiple ways of seeing. As an output for this research, I created an atlas⁶² that serves as both map and divination tool where fragments of interviews and media from across Western China become worlds within worlds. The map transforms through different modes of movement, strategies for shifting perspectives as designers, which ask us: what would we design if our central perspective could change, taking the qualities of different beings, forces, breath? Embedded throughout are questions and prompts that invite users to drift, to linger, to find new velocities. Most importantly, twelve practitioners–writers, designers, painters, strategists–that I have been in conversation with throughout the project have contributed artifacts that expand these ideas through their own mediums. I wanted to create something that comes to life through multiple voices and reinterpretations, that holds contradictory truths in relation, and that proposes a philosophy of movement within the practice of design itself.

Fig. 10 - Design in Rising Winds Atlas

In the cemetery, I meet Mister Ma, a Hui ecological laborer who migrated to Dunhuang and now maintains afforestation sites, including those concealing these graves. He invites me to sit while he works, pausing occasionally to pray, contemplate, speak with me. As he moves between shrubs with practiced attention, I feel with a strange sense of relief that his simple gestures–including inhaling and exhaling–hold some part of our broken world together. In this dry and quiet corner of our planet, I find a recognition that every breath is already shared, already cycling through countless beings, already recomposing immense landscapes, and–as the character for wind reminds us–bringing together the infinitely small with the infinitely vast.

See Konior, Bogna. “The Gnostic Machine.” Oxford University Press EBooks, 25 May 2023, pp. 89–108, link
Robbins, Jim. “Global “Stilling”: Is Climate Change Slowing down the Wind?” Yale E360, 13 Sept. 2022, link
According to the World Bank reports, UNDP Human Development reports, and China's National Bureau of Statistics provinces like Gansu rank regularly among the poorest in China.
Zee, Jerry C. Continent in Dust. University of California Press, 11 Jan. 2022, p. 23.
Zee, Jerry C. Continent in Dust. University of California Press, 11 Jan. 2022, p. 42.
Zee prefers the term “late socialist” to “postsocialist” because it “defies definitive endings of socialism and instead “emphasizes the capacity to relational mutation”. See Zee, Jerry C. Continent in Dust. University of California Press, 11 Jan. 2022, p. 35.
Zee, Jerry C. Continent in Dust. University of California Press, 11 Jan. 2022, p. 23.
Zee, Jerry C. Continent in Dust. University of California Press, 11 Jan. 2022, p. 23.
Referred to also as “kosa” in Japanese and “hwangsa” in Korean.
Zee, Jerry C. Continent in Dust. University of California Press, 11 Jan. 2022, p. 24.
Xinhua News Agency. “中共中央国务院关于全面推进美丽中国建设的意见_最新政策_中国政府网.” Beijing, January 11. Www.gov.cn, 2024, link
Rodenbiker, Jesse. Ecological States. Environments of East Asia, 2023, p. 188.
Rodenbiker, Jesse. Ecological States. Environments of East Asia, 2023, p. 204.
Later representations of models clearly show this lineage, sometimes depicting diagrams mimicking five-phase cosmology. See Wang, Rusong, et al. “Understanding Eco-Complexity: Social-Economic-Natural Complex Ecosystem Approach.” Ecological Complexity, vol. 8, no. 1, Mar. 2011, pp. 15–29, link
Rodenbiker, Jesse. Ecological States. Environments of East Asia, 2023, p. 41.
Zee, Jerry C. Continent in Dust. University of California Press, 11 Jan. 2022, p. 183.
See Deputy Minister of the Chinese State Environmental Protection Agency, Pan Yue’s communication titled “On Socialist Ecological Civilization.” See “A Courageous Voice for a Greener China.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 11 July 2005, link
World Bank. “Foreign Direct Investment – the China Story.” World Bank, 16 July 2010, link
You, Mi. Art in a Multipolar World. Hatje Cantz, 7 Jan. 2025, p. 121.
You, Mi. Art in a Multipolar World. Hatje Cantz, 7 Jan. 2025, p. 123.
You, Mi. Art in a Multipolar World. Hatje Cantz, 7 Jan. 2025, p. 121.
Bauer, Marko, and Davide Grassi. (Re)Programming Strategies for Self-Renewal. Aksioma, 2022, p. 60.
Bauer, Marko. “Benjamin H. Bratton on Terraforming the World Order.” Palladium, 11 Jan. 2021, link
See Aihwa Ong. Neoliberalism as Exception : Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham N.C., Duke University Press, 2006.
You, Mi. Art in a Multipolar World. Hatje Cantz, 7 Jan. 2025, p. 124.
“Crassulacean Acid Metabolism - an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics.” link
Wu, Qinhong, et al. “Strategic Transparency under Authoritarian Environmentalism: Information Disclosure and the Role of Environmental NGOs in China’s National Emission Trading Scheme.” Climate Policy, 3 Aug. 2024, pp. 1–20, link
“From Publications to Policy: China Launches World’s Largest Carbon Market.” Unesco.org, 2021, link
Wu, Qinhong, et al. “Strategic Transparency under Authoritarian Environmentalism: Information Disclosure and the Role of Environmental NGOs in China’s National Emission Trading Scheme.” Climate Policy, 3 Aug. 2024, p. 4, link
A term defined by Jesse Rodenbiker in his book Ecological States to refer to the logics that undergird state techniques of governing nature, society, and space.
Alipay Ant Forest and IUCN Red List Join Forces to Increase Public Awareness on Biodiversity and Conservation.” IUCN, 20 Nov. 2024, link
Bratton, Benjamin . Accept All Cookies. Berggruen Press, 2025, p. 18.
These are calculated through a foreign NGO partner like The Nature Conservancy. See “Ant Forest.” The Nature Conservancy, link
Jagoda, Patrick. Experimental Games : Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification. University Of Chicago Press, 2020, p. 12.
Jagoda, Patrick. Experimental Games : Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification. University Of Chicago Press, 2020, p. 12.
Bauer, Marko, and Davide Grassi. (Re)Programming Strategies for Self-Renewal. Aksioma, 2022, p. 60.
Shao, Grace. “Has China Gone All in on Open-Source, Open-Weight, and Why?” Substack.com, AI Proem, 19 May 2025, link
This term was first coined by the CCRU in ‘Hyperstition: An Introduction’: Delphi Carstens Interviews Nick Land. 2009.
De Seta, Gabriele. “抖音拓扑：网关、筛子、圆顶 | a Topology of TikTok: Gateway, Sieve, Dome - Gabriele de Seta.” Gabriele de Seta, 26 June 2021, link
You, Mi. Art in a Multipolar World. Hatje Cantz, 7 Jan. 2025, p. 189.
Dylan Levi King. “The Genealogy of Chinese Cybernetics.” Palladium Magazine, 17 Oct. 2022, link
You, Mi. Art in a Multipolar World. Hatje Cantz, 7 Jan. 2025, p. 189.
King, Dylan Levi. “It’s Not There but It Might Be Someday / Notes for an Essay on Woman in the Dunes and Qian Xuesen’s Industrial Sand Theory.” Substack.com, CJK, 31 Oct. 2023, link
Whittaker, Nathan. “The Harvest: This Week in Rural China – Dispatch No. 17 (11 April 2025).” Thisweekinruralchina.com, This Week in Rural China, 11 Apr. 2025, link
Roberts, Rachel. “Chinese Workers Build Railway Station in Just Nine Hours.” The Independent, 23 Jan. 2018, link
Wood Mackenzie. “China to Hold over 80% of Global Solar Manufacturing Capacity from 2023-26 | Wood Mackenzie.” link
Hunchuck, Elise M, et al. “The Avery Review | Prologue to the Sky River.” Averyreview.com, link
See Heilmann, Sebastian. “From Local Experiments to National Policy: The Origins of China’s Distinctive Policy Process.” The China Journal, vol. 59, no. 59, Jan. 2008, pp. 1–30, link
Taylor, Monique, and Jeremy Garlick. ““Flexible” versus “Fragmented” Authoritarianism: Evidence from Chinese Foreign Policy during the Xi Jinping Era.” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 18 Dec. 2024, pp. 1–20, link
Kahn, Nora. “Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence.” After Us, 10 Oct. 2016, link
Malabou, Catherine. “What Is Intelligence?” Spike Art Magazine, no. 77, 2023, p. 34.
Morgan, William , et al. “Human-AI Interaction Design.” Haiid.net, 2025, haiid.net/.
The site’s name is Babusha Forest Farm. See People's Daily. “Desertification Control Miracle: Babusha Forest Farm - People’s Daily Online.” People.cn, 2023, link. Accessed 12 June 2025.
Quoted by McKenzie Wark in Capital is Dead. See Wark, Mckenzie. Capital Is Dead. London ; New York, Verso, 2019
Rodenbiker, Jesse. Ecological States. Environments of East Asia, 2023, p. 37
“雁归故里麦香浓——一对返乡青年的乡村振兴梦_尹发华_古浪_刘瑞.” Sohu.com, 20 May 2025, link
Xi, Ran. “Rural Chinese Youth on Kuaishou: Performing Gender, Labor, and Rurality.” Journal of Youth Studies, 19 Aug. 2024, pp. 1–23, link
Ding, Iza. The Performative State. Cornell University Press, 15 Sept. 2022, p. 25
Rao, Venkatesh. “The Art of Pretending to Govern.” Venkateshrao.com, Contraptions, 27 July 2024, link
Zhang, Gary Zhexi. “The Internet of Egregores.” Platforms: Around, in Between, and through - Singapore Biennale, 2022.
Engseng Ho. The Graves of Tarim : Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley, University Of California Press, 2006, p. 29.
You may access the atlas at: link

related entries

Ruins without nostalgia

Marcos Parajua

publication

(...) What remains after an event? Does language prevail over an image or a sound in presenting “that which remains”? Edmund Burke invokes Milton: “(Over) many a dark and dreary (valley) They (passed), and many a region dolorous; (Over) many a frozen, many a fiery Alp; Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of Death”. Burke contends: “This idea or this affection caused by a word (Death), which nothing but a word could annex to the others…”.1 In this saying, the ways of romantic visual arts are too articulate to lend proper care to indeterminacy. Retrospectively we might argue that Burke contemplated abstraction exclusively as “thought” realised in language but I´d rather follow a different inquiry. Burke also conceives descriptive language an insufficient correlate of the object described; this, he observes, is not a problem of clarity but intensity. To bridge the difference...(more)

Vertigo²

Alexandre Montserrat

publication

(...) Historical representation's progressive unmooring from positivist certitude, its recognition as a discursively and mythically shaped domain, discovers a potent contemporary inflection with Large Language Models. Such systems appear, offering less passive archival functions or neutral narrative conduits, more formidable ‘writing machines’ actively operationalising the construction of historical understanding. An LLM, in this capacity, presents an unprecedented historiographical agent. It moves beyond recording or interpreting the past to effectively generate textual instantiations, guided by an intrinsic, data-derived logic...(more)

artwork video
the wet boxIan Margo 2025, digital video, color, sound 16:9 4K, 10:10min...(more)

artworkfieldwareIan Margo 2025, digital video, color, sound 16:9 4K, 11:00min...(more)