Sowing Diversity Harvesting Security

This is not a story as structured but contains the most authentic connotation of life story and aesthetic photography exhibition. The exhibition takes farming seeds as the mainline through the great nature, seed breeding, food growing, seed spreading and diverse vitality, and interprets the divine vastness of nature and the profound diversity and long history of traditional farming culture.

 

Nature breeds all living beings and is the source of human spirit, wisdom, passion and beauty. By the banks of the Jinsha River, the Moso people, deep in the mountains, truly believe “man and nature are brothers”. Yes, we are dependent on the earth, but the biological world is not infinite. The earth has gone through five mass extinctions in its 4.6 billion years history. In the fifth dinosaur extinction season, 70 percent of the species were gone, and life began anew, taking 65 million years to enter the current Holocene. The geographical and ecological diversity of the Holocene, rich species and biodiversity bring stability to the world, so the whole biological world ushered in a soft and stable rhythm, in line with the change and transformation of the seasons. About 200,000-100,000 years ago, human beings emerged. About 10,000 years ago, starting from the domestication of plants and seeds, human beings entered the first civilization in human history, namely the farming civilization, which opened the glorious history of human civilization. However, in the past half-century, farming culture has been declining, traditions have been forgotten, biodiversity has been disappearing, climate change has been intensified year by year and disasters have occurred frequently, which have seriously endangered the roots of human civilization and threatened our common home.

 

If tradition is a river, the traditional river of Chinese farming culture has been running for more than 5,000 years in the rich and diverse natural ecology of China. About 20 percent of the world's main cultivated crops originate from China, millet originating from the Weihe River and the Yellow River, and rice from the Yangtze River. Since domestication, planting, seed selection, exchange, and distribution have formed a general pattern of northern millet and southern rice, a highly diversified sustainable farming system with the goal of Five Abundant Crops and Six Prosperous Livestock. Small farmers cultivate from generation to generation, guarding the living seeds and the roots of China.

 

This exhibition shows photos from 12 traditional farming villages in six provinces in the North, South, East, and West of China, including Naxi families along the Jinsha River, women farmers on the Qinghai Plateau, and the senior people and kids from the Karst mountains. You can see the millennium-old millet that originated in Northern China, and smell the fresh rice fragrance from Southern China. Through the photography’s art expression of real-life beauty with the fragrance of the earth, every vivid and clever image conveys farmers’ belief in seeds, reveals the true meaning of life, and interprets the way of harmony of man and nature!