Becoming Relations: Performative Representation as a Form of Resistance
This practice-based PhD investigates the socio-environmental transformations in the Zoige Plateau, the east Tibetan region, focusing on how the Chinese government has employed various modes of representation to drive political, environmental, and social transformations. These representations, rooted in a reductive view of living and non-living beings, imply the abstraction and simplification of both the land and its inhabitants, transforming Zoige into a resource for national economic development. Such interventions have marginalised Tibetan knowledge systems and disrupted the interconnected relations between Tibetans and non-human entities.
This research develops ‘performative representation’ as the methodology for resisting the state’s Tibetan epistemology erasure. By performative representation I mean the practice of embedding myself within the lived experiences of local Tibetans – through shared practices such as living, eating, working, and engaging in daily life. Furthermore, performative representation seeks to co-produce representations in collaboration with the community through ‘thinking-feeling’ together with local people rather than ‘speaking for’ them, developing new forms of Tibetan knowledge against the state’s knowledge colonisation. This methodology enables a deeper engagement with the complex relations that constitute Tibetan life and land, positioning research as a collective, participatory process.
Performative representation focuses on land care practice, which centres on the loss of grasslands essential to current Tibetan herders’ livelihoods. The land care practice will be unpacked with socio-ecological practices, including grass seeds collecting and planting, collective and intergenerational conversations, story-telling and spatial practice around pastures, sacred landscapes, herbs, weather observation, and the care of non-human living beings (e.g., yaks and sheep). This practice not only works toward ecological restoration (e.g., grass planting and water collection) but also fosters knowledge transmission between Tibetan elders and younger generations through oral and visual communications, consolidating their own positionality towards their land and knowledge. In this way, the research will mobilise local Tibetans to relearn their territory and situated knowledge mentally and physically, which could form resistance to the manipulation and knowledge erasure imposed by the state’s transformations legitimated by scientific realist representations.
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Biography
Mingxin Li is an activist, environmental architect, and PhD candidate investigating socio-environmental transformations conducted by the Chinese government in the Zoige Plateau through different regimes of representation. Furthermore, he is developing community-based actions with the Tibetan community to face the current knowledge erasure and land degradation. Before undertaking his PhD at the Royal College of Art (RCA), he explored the symbiotic relationship between bacteria and stromatolites in Chile's Salar de Llamara through mapping, animation, and fiction writing – a project developed in the Lithium Triangle Research Studio of the MA in Environmental Architecture.
In 2025, he received the Alumni UK Climate Action Grant funded by the British Council for his participatory and community-based grass seeding actions and pedagogical sessions tackling current land degradation based on Tibetan knowledge. In 2024, he received the Food Action Award (Emerging Practice) funded by CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA for his work on addressing the decline of yak-herding wetlands in Zoige Marsh, located at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Currently, he works as an architectural researcher with the INTERPRT studio and the G.I.T. (Territorial Research Group). His collective and individual works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Helsinki Biennial 2023, Galeria Municipal do Porto, Färgfabriken, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Design Chongqing Biennale 2022, and Tongji University.
Degrees
MA Environmental Architecture, Royal College of Art, 2020
BA Environmental Design, Jiangnan University, 2018
Exhibitions
(2024) 'ØYFJELLET: From the Frontline of Land Rights in Sápmi' (INTERPRT and CLIMATE RIGHTS). Stormen kunst/dájdda.
(2024) 'Cyclone Pam Stories' (INTERPRT). Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss. TBA21-Ocean Space & NTU ADM Gallery.
(2023) ‘Colonial Present: Counter-mapping the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Sápmi’ (INTERPRT). Helsinki Biennial 2023. HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki.
(2023) ‘Montanha Invertida’ (G.I.T.). Desejos Compulsivos. Galeria Municipal do Porto, Porto.
(2023) ‘The Ends of The World’ (Lithium Triangle Research Studio). Desejos Compulsivos. Galeria Municipal do Porto, Porto.
(2022) 'Towards a Symbiotic Mode of Development'. Design Chongqing Biennale 2022. Chongqing.
(2020) ‘The Ends of The World’ (Lithium Triangle Research Studio). Lithium. Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
(2016) 'GREEN IS CREATIVE'. Tongji University, Shanghai.
Publications
'MICRO-ORGANISMOS NO DESERTO' in Lítio-Estados de Exaustão (Eds.) Francisco Diaz, Anastasia Kubrak and Marina Otero Verzier. Dafne Editora / Galeria Municipal do Porto, 2023.
'Microorganisms in the Desert' in Lithium: States of Exhaustion (Eds.) Francisco Diaz, Anastasia Kubrak and Marina Otero Verzier. Het Nieuwe Instituut / Ediciones ARQ, 2021.