TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

In 2016, Bo Zheng initiated a series of queer ecological video arts in Taiwan titled Pteridophilia, seeking to explore possible critique toward the instrumentalizationof non-human species within the context of Taiwan’s cultural-political history of plants, while also responding to Taiwan’s current scenario as a “pioneer of queer movements in Asia.” The term “Pteridophilia,” a combination of ‘pterido-’ and ‘-philia,’ signifies an exploration of diverse erotic/sexual interactions between humans and Taiwanese ferns, aiming to establish interspecies connections characterized by corporeality, intimacy, and queer fantasy. This paper, focusing on the five serial video-texts of Pteridophilia, examines the anti-normative and transgressive momentum of “queer ecosexuality” between humans and ferns. Through this analysis, it seeks to re-articulate the queer ecological critique within the cultural-natural contexts of Asian/island Taiwan while developing the interdisciplinary potentials of media technological discourse. The paper introduces “queer eco-sensibility” as a core conceptual framework to articulate the dual aesthetic effects radiated by Pteridophilia: First, the transgressive erotic connections occurring in the trans-species dynamic do not lead to an accumulative reproductive futurity nor are they solely invested in achieving the jouissance; but instead they both construct affective pathways toward engaging with the marginalized species and formulate a contemporary queer ecological ethic of intra-existence/protection. Second, the queer ecological eroticism expressed through corporeal performance is directed toward plant bodies and, through shifts between panoramic and microscopic scales in the video scenarios, disperses into the different layers of visualization. These transitions—spanning from "flesh/plant bodies," "hands/leaves," "lips/leaf tips," to "tongue coating /spore clusters"—blur the boundaries between categories, delineating a dynamic inter-species transgression. If queer ecological eroticism/sexuality in art aims to subvert the anthropocentric canons, this paper furthermore endeavors to repair an alternative relation of erotic symbiotics among local human communities, multispecies, and our shared environments.