The Political Life of a Coral Lagoon

Chapter 1, 2025. Supported by National Asian Culture Center, Gwangju.

The Political Life of a Coral Lagoon 1, 2025, is composed of footage from Zheng Bo's daily swims near Poé, among the resplendent biodiversity of the world’s second-largest coral lagoon, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Inspired by the 12th-century poem "The Conference of the Birds" by Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur, biologist Thomas Seeley’s 2010 book "Honeybee Democracy," and drawing on fish behavior research by scientists Iain Couzin and Jens Kraus, Zheng Bo perceives the marine ecosystem as a sophisticated political community. In a script written by the artist that transitions into a final passage enlisting ChatGPT, a speculative first-person dialogue between fishes rouses in speech bubbles. Beginning with an incantatory slogan by iridescent damselfish (Chromis viridis) swimming through an Acropora coral: “Our motto is: Vibrancy, Vibrancy, Vibrancy,” it is a clarion call for a deeper connection and reflection of nature and environmental intelligence, for beauty and political wisdom, against the tides of human hubris, towards a multi-species and interspecies vibrancy.

(Text by Jo-ey Tang)