Proceed to Chang Tang- Yiyi Wei, BFA Glass, 2019

The trip to Chang Tang, now recalling from memory, feels like a distant past, even though the last night we spent at the plateau was only a week ago. 

By the beginning of the last month of the internship, Liang and I arrived at Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Situating at 4000 meter above sea level(approximately 13120 ft), Lhasa is the center of temples and Tibetan buddhism pilgrims, the home to Dalai Lama, the intersections of different businesses, the high light of chapters in history books and the holy land of hippies.

It is, also where the headquarter of WCS’s Tibetan branch office have placed themselves. In a two stories apartment-styled home, total number of four employees wrote proposals, had meetings and prepared for their many journeys into the wilderness of Chang Tang. 

Lan Zhou Jia and Duo Jie Jia are the two Tibetan employees who had been working for WCS for couple of years. Lan Zhou Jia is a very quiet middle aged man with two adorable children. Liang told me not to under-estimate Lan Zhou Jia’s shyness. “He transforms into a super talkative, passionate ‘beast’ when he’s advocating the importance of conservation to Tibetan nomads,” he said, “the perfect man for community works.” Duo Jie Jia (he preferred us calling him Duo Jie) is relatively younger and came along with us on this trip to Chang Tang. Later on I found out that he is very fluent in English, Mandarin and Tibetan as well as being really knowledgeable in plant species and their latin names. There is also Liang, my supervisor and Jia Jia, a girl from Beijing, who I never had a chance to meet since she had been out on a business trip while I was there. 

There were five of us went up to Chang Tang together in total. Liang, Duo Jie, Ling Yun, Ya Ya and I. Ling Yun just finished her postdoctoral position at Beijing University, researched specifically on snow leopards in the highlands and worked as one of the core researcher at Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve that I mentioned in the first blog post. She is now very interested in studying the ecology niche of ‘hoofed’ animals (wild yak, Tibetan antelope, gazelle, wild donkey, argali and Marco Polo sheep) in Chang Tang. Ya Ya (nickname) is from Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region adjacent to Tibet. Started as a bird watching hobbyist, she established a non-profit organization called Wild Xinjiang, couple of years ago. This organization gathered volunteers across ages and disciplines to advocate for the biodiversity on the vast landscape of Xin Jiang. 

Being the only person came from a greatly different education background(different fields and educated in a different country), they were very curious about my purpose there. While trying to explain my intension in cross-discipline learning and collaboration, I realized a gap in the communication between my interest and their understanding of contemporary art. Liang thought that after I learnt about conservation in the past month, it would be a good time for me to put together a presentation and show them the world of art that I was interested in. 

The presentation was really a tool for igniting conversations, which worked very well among the five of us. That day we spent a lot of time together while in the office, or out for a walk, or over hotpot, talking about Joseph Beuys, social sculpture, performance lecture, pedagogy as art, community, history of science, the collective knowledge, the imagined future……

With a lot of new thoughts and ideas on our minds, we shopped for supplies, packed our pickup truck and soon got on the road to Chang Tang.