Over the past 20 years, the mentioning of the name Li Shan has rendered people in the art scene speechless. We are not referring to the "Li Shan" from the 85 New Wave movement as chronicled in art history, or the "Li Shan" of the Rouge series, but rather to the "Li Shan" who performed genome editing on eggplants, tomatoes, bitter melons, sesames, and pumpkins; this is the "Li Shan" who turned one type of pumpkin into another. People have expressed doubts over his motives, and wondered why the dormant deoxyribonucleic acid fragments from the laboratory have caused him to transform from the already successful "Li Shan" into doing, wholeheartedly, the work of a biologist! This summer, the seventy-five years-old Li Shan is determined to confess to the public and present his conspiracy with the other Li Shan in the form of an exhibition.

The two of them first abandoned the use of material, followed by the dismantling of art language frameworks, and then they worked directly to manufacture real living organisms that are capable of free self-expression – through the hands of science, works of art that can’t be characterized are made.

But what is life? Physicist Erwin Schrödinger stated that a living system survives on "negentropy." The chemist Paul J. Crutzen suggested over a decade ago that Earth has entered the geological epoch of "anthropocene", which means that the influence of human behavior on Earth has already reached a magnitude similar to glaciation, species extinction, or a major asteroid impact. The cumulative entropy from all these large-scale activities hints at the eventual demise of humankind and a return to the darkness and chaos that was once the origin of life. So, how do we reverse this situation? Do we need some special means to metabolize the entropy that we continue producing? Can a "neganthropocene" allow us to escape this dead end on such a cosmic level, and to help us in finding a new kind of speculative cosmology? What would the art of "neganthropocene" be like?

Li Shan was one of the first artists to sense the signal of a crisis. In 1993, he saw the sculpture of a hybridized humanoid by the artist Matthew Barney at the Venice Biennale. For Li Shan, the image of this sculpture did not come from a mythical imagination, but rather from the unresolved state of humanity. However, Li Shan wanted to be more rigorous than Barney by intentionally abandoning the system – the system of rules and evaluations that comprise a professional career in art production – and in turn reflect on the human-centered view of science as he attempted to challenge the ethical boundaries set by humankind. In the article An Introduction to Bio-drawing, Li Shan wrote: "What an artist does, in her or his own way of thinking and doing, is really about finding a different mode of interpretation in life. "This interpretation is not about being the carrier for the continuation of the creation of cultural history – that is the subject of aesthetics and the representation of fantasies. What Li Shan wanted was to enable the genes of an organism to express themselves freely, with this expression occurring through his effort of biological intermixing. In this case, achieving an uninhibited mode of development is the goal and also the means as well. As a result, the first work of BioArt, Reading No. 98-1, was born.

In the work Reading No. 98-1, the genes of a fish and a butterfly were modified and reorganized. "The charm of the butterfly and the fish is that it can make humanity 'jitter'." A jitter, indeed, disrupts the preconceived ways people think about art and artists. Through Li Shan, art can be freed from working on the salvation of the soul or a mirroring of society, and instead begin to be read from under a microscope, allowing speculation on the alternative possibilities of life. Conducting experiments and making paintings–one sporadic and the other precise –are similar to the construction of the two spiraling strands of DNA, and they form the unique and powerful language of Li Shan. In his notes, Li Shan wrote: "The readers may be accustomed to using biological creatures, the human body, and other life substances as mediums, and through touching these mediums they can sense its cultural and historical significance. But the biological creature in the work Reading is not the medium. It is not the carrier of any cultural or historical significance. If it is to possess any implication at all, the biological creature itself is my implication."

This exhibition will showcase the complete creative biological proposals and experimental processes done by Li Shan since 1995 through actual objects, photographs, videos, documentation, installations, and sculptures. Through this exhibition, the Power Station of Art hopes to initiate a discussion on life and the art forms of the future together with the artist, as if standing in the maize field of the "teosinte" and "Hermaphroditic" looking up towards the formation of the "third dark cloud" in the sky as described by Lord Kelvin. Who are we? What are the passcodes that are hidden in our genes? What does the large amount of noncoding "useless" DNA inside our bodies signify? In the age of human domination, how do we suppress our own human arrogance, delay the speed of entropy, and curb our desire so that it does not get generated so easily? Perhaps artists can provide us with the necessary help and inspiration.