Flora & Fauna: Domestic Nature and Private Collecting in Reform Era Beijing

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Publication Date｜2025-06-01

Authors｜I-Yi Hsieh

Press｜Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN｜9789819654031

Synopsis

｜Description｜

This book is about the intimacy and shared changes of life in domestic nature cultivation in Beijing. It asks a simple question: how do people express themselves when the state control on communication is severely tightened and the public space is increasingly replaced by the marketplace? By bringing to the fore an ethnography of the rise of Flora and Fauna—the aesthetic practice of cultivating nature at home—this book tends to the transformation of the classic Chinese practice of collecting, shoucang, and tells how, against a retreating horizon of free speech, a symbolism of nature arises as anchor for affective commentaries on history, the self, and politics. With the poetics of nature becoming forms of expressive culture, this book charts the domestic as politically charged space wherein aesthetic sovereignty is negotiated. Flora and Fauna urges us to reconsider the aesthetics of nature and politics of domestication, amid the tremendous social transformation annotated by market crises in China today.

 

｜About the Author｜

I-Yi Hsieh is a Researcher at International Center for Cultural Studies, Taiwan National Yangming-Chiaotung University

 

｜Contents｜

CHAPTER 1: Introduction: The Use of an Object…1

CHAPTER 2: Aesthetic Sovereignty: Humming Insects and Ethno-Entomology…35

CHAPTER 3: Tanked Fish and Aquatic Happiness…61

CHAPTER 4: Flower and Bird: Aesthetics of Domestic Nature…93

CHAPTER 5: Grotesque Angels of History: The Eight Great Marvels…127

CHAPTER 6: Coda: Flora and Fauna in Crisis…177

Index…187

 

｜Editorial reviews ｜

 

"This sophisticated, beautifully written book explores the sensorial worlds of Old Beijing connoisseurs and their nonhuman companions. I-Yi Hsieh’s text immerses us in nostalgic activities including the poetics of cricket-human communication and the mutually sustaining labor of heritage goldfish and their breeders. The result is an unforgettable account of multispecies life existing on the margins of a city marked by its relentless pursuit of growth."  

--- Nicholas Bartlett, Assistant Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University. 

 

"This is a brilliant and timely book. Blending political economy, social psychology, ethnography and ecology, Hsieh’s original and engaging study views modern China through the traders and clients of the city’s insect-fish-flower-bird markets. The author paints an intimate picture of their lives and livelihoods, showing how the nostalgic traditions of folk-art connoisseurship subsist in a society under intense political control and commercial pressures. Hsieh’s work is at the same time theoretically sophisticated and deeply humane, taking seriously the domestic care of nature in miniature, against the background of implacable external forces." 

--- Peter Stewart, Director, Classical Art Research Centre Professor of Ancient Art University of Oxford

 

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