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

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, Barnard College, NY, USA

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.

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

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