Regenerative Artivism: Listening to the Work of Asian Women Artivists

In this introductory episode, I lay out the core idea of regenerative artivism and the scope of the podcast. Speaking from southern California with my attention grounded in East Asia, I reflect on how art, care, and collective imagination help communities confront social and environmental injustice and craft/cultivate more livable futures in damaged places. Using the image of a threatened valley and the community-organized Meinung Yellow Butterfly Festival (美濃黃蝶祭), I introduce regeneration as an ongoing practice rather than a single victory.I explain why Season 1 focuses on women artivists in the greater China region and why their often-overlooked work in creeks, kitchens, schools, villages, and resettlement sites matters for environmental thinking. I situate the podcast in relation to my own long-term field research and to the limits of academic writing, framing the series as a slow, seminar-like space for listening, critical reflection, and grounded imagination. The episode closes with an invitation to consider a place that matters to you, the damages it has absorbed, and the quiet forms of care already at work there.Keywordsregenerative artivism, regenerative aesthetics, socially engaged art, environmental art, ecofeminism, environmental humanities, Asia, East Asia, Greater China, community art, environmental justice, social justice, regeneration, care, multispecies relations, public pedagogy, art and ecology, women artivistsKey References Demos, T. J. Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016.ECOARTASIA. Digital Archive of Chinese Socially and Ecologically Engaged Art. https://ecoartasia.net/.Gablik, Suzi. The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1991.Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.Kester, Grant H. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.Lerner, Steve. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.Wang, Meiqin. "Ecology, Environmental Art, and Sustainable Community Building: The Meinung Yellow Butterfly Festival as a Case of Environmental Activism in Taiwan." International Journal of Social Sustainability in Economic, Social, and Cultural Context 19, no. 2 (2023): 75–101.Wang, Meiqin. Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China: Voices from Below. London: Routledge, 2019.Wang, Meiqin, ed. Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2022.My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang