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Why Lijiang
2415 Art Residency is situated in Lijiang, China, at an altitude of 2,415 meters, offering a unique vantage point for artists and researchers to explore the intersection of ecological fragility, cultural transformation, and high-altitude perception.
Lijiang’s geographical and historical positioning as a borderland of shifting identities and environmental transitions makes it an ideal space for interdisciplinary artistic inquiry.
We encourage projects that critically engage with site-specificity, interrogating the tensions between natural landscapes and human interventions, living traditions and historical erasure, global circulation and localized resilience.
With a focus on ecological and cultural shifts, 2415 Art Residency serves as a platform for exploring the dynamics of change, survival, and adaptation in a world of accelerating transformations.
Ecological Fragility and Changing Landscapes
Lijiang is home to the southernmost glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, a site where climate change is visibly unfolding.
The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (Yulong Xueshan), a sacred landscape in local mythology, is simultaneously a fragile ecological marker—its retreating glaciers, shifting vegetation zones, and changing hydrological systems embody the tangible effects of global warming at high altitudes.
This region is also a major mycological hotspot, producing matsutake (松茸) and diverse wild mushrooms, which serve as indicators of climatic shifts, soil health, and ecosystem resilience. The presence, absence, or mutations of these species offer a natural register of ecological changes, linking foraging practices, local economies, and global markets in an intricate environmental web.
Artistic and research inquiries in this area may explore:
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High-altitude climate change and its visual, material, and conceptual manifestations.
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Glacial retreat as an ecological and cultural event, connecting geological time with human perception.
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Mushrooms as more-than-human agents, narrating histories of survival, extraction, and symbiosis.
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The aesthetics of environmental vulnerability, how landscapes encode disappearance, decay, and renewal.
Cross-Cultural Encounters and Vanishing Worlds
Lijiang is situated within the broader framework of Zomia, a term coined by historian Willem van Schendel and further explored by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Zomia refers to the vast highland region spanning Southwest China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and India, where statelessness, mobility, and cultural hybridity have historically shaped social structures.
This region has long been a cultural confluence, historically serving as a key node along the Tea Horse Road, a trans-Himalayan trade route connecting Tibetan, Bai, Yi, and Han Chinese communities. Today, Lijiang remains the largest urban center in Southwest Yunnan, offering a unique vantage point from which to observe cultural entanglements, linguistic shifts, and disappearing ways of life.
The residency is positioned at a crossroads where artists can confront the complexities of cultural continuity and loss. From the ritual practices of the Dongba shamans to the eroding architectures of old caravan towns, Lijiang presents a landscape where fragments of the past persist in an uneasy dialogue with modernity.
Artistic and research inquiries in this area may explore:
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Zomia as a conceptual and physical borderland, where cultural and political autonomy have historically been negotiated.
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Borderland identities and hybrid cultures, how movement and migration shape belonging.
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Vanishing architectural and linguistic landscapes, capturing traces of disappearing worlds.
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The politics of cultural heritage and preservation, when conservation itself becomes a spectacle.
