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Recent brief on perception of place, influenced by the notion of everchanging perception due to many factors and the environment we are in, etc. 35mm black and white film.
Mesh corsets for Zodiac.
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Being this the first year of study at university, adapting to learning environments was hard, because being used to noise around while studying was a habit of mine during high school. That habit was comforted with the library computers on the first floor. There’d be an huge flow of students around 12pm, with conversation and mobiles making noise which helped with my study habit, but would be to others a negative learning environment since there are no prohibition of mobile devices and conversation.
Library computers are mainly used for students who’re typing up there essay, assignments, etc. Even though this environment is close to everything, i.e. books and resources, the noise would be the factor that makes it a not so good learning environment.
We believe this place is negative for working because on most days it gets very crowded and loud. It’s more of a social place to meet than a working environment.
Diaspora Climate
Exhibition: February 12 to March 5, 2026
Reception: Thursday, February 12 from 5-7PM
Curated by Yan Zhou, 2025–26 Curator-in-Residence
artLAB Gallery
Sara Angelucci
Teresa Chan
Ma Yongfeng
Rehab Nazzal
Public Programs and Events:
Ink Marbling Workshop
Led by Teresa Chan
VA 206 / JLVAC, February 12, 12-2PM
Murmuration
Live Sound Performance
Teresa Chan and Jan Lai
February 12, 5:45–6:15 PM
artLAB Gallery
Screening and Discussion: Rehab Nazal's documentary film Vibrations from Gaza
Participants: Rehab Nazal, Kirsty Robertson, Sheri Nault, Ma Yongfeng and Yan Zhou
February 23 from 1:15-3PM
In-person: VAC 249
Online: Zoom
Curatorial Statement
Diaspora Climate brings together diverse climates, cultures, languages, histories, memories, feelings, perspectives, and connections through personal experiences and artistic expressions, linking an affinity with both natural environments and cultural dispositions. Human beings are as sensitive to displacement and transplantation as plants and animals. Diaspora Climate signals the ethical and emotional bonds diasporic people hold with the climatic pressures affecting them both “here” and “there”, including struggles, suffering, and the shared fate of the world and planet Earth.
The exhibition features work by four artists: Sara Angelucci (Toronto), Teresa Chan (Toronto), Ma Yongfeng (Berlin), and Rehab Nazzal (occupied West Bank, Palestine). Their works respond to relationships with particular places, cultures, histories, climates, and environments, while also addressing ongoing afflictions of social and environmental violence, driven by brutal global capitalism, colonialism, and arbitrary state apparatuses. These forces bring wars, relentless exploitation, and the dispossession of living space and life for both nature and people, intensifying the Climate Crisis. The voices and gestures that artists share through their works are ripples of Global Diaspora Solidarity.
The Japanese word fudo (Chinese and Japanese Kanji: ??) is translated as “climate,” yet its meaning extends beyond meteorological conditions. It signifies the inseparable and mutually formative relationship among seasons, climate, nature, and modes of human life and sensibility in a particular place, culture, and its history. A related Chinese saying, ????????, expresses a similar idea: that the soil and waters of a given land nurture the distinctive dispositions of its people. In this sense, fudo (????) is comparable to the ancient Greek concept of chorographia, which refers to the description or mapping of a specific region or country, emphasizing local features, history, natural history, and culture, in contrast to geography, which sought to describe the world as a whole. Chorographia suggests that the topography, natural environment, and social and political structures of a particular area are interconnected.[1] fudo (????) is still embodied in East Asian perceptions of the world and in their aesthetic–climatic sensibilities, whereas in the modern Western world, a scientific divide tends to separate and dominate human relationships with nature.
When the modern Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji (1889–1960) brought the traditional East Asian concept of fudo (??) into dialogue with Western scientific notions of “climate” and “environment,” he understood climate not merely as a natural phenomenon. Rather, he argued that human existence, history, and climate are inseparable. In a climatic register, humans apprehend themselves and shape both individual and collective sensibilities. Therefore, social, cultural, and political transformation depends upon the transformation of climatic culture; as it changes, the customs and habits of a people change accordingly (????). Furthermore, Watsuji suggests that diaspora, those who have left and become distanced from their homeland, and the “other,” who does not fully belong to a given climatic culture, may grasp a climate and fudo (??) in a uniquely profound and nuanced way, one that is often more reflective and thought-provoking.[2]
Diaspora holds an acute and incisive political position from which to question and reinterpret the relationship between climate and culture. It activates each individual as a micro-center, responsible for addressing issues of climate change and for pursuing climate and social justice.
Diaspora refuses to be fixed to a single position. Carried on in migration and drifting, diaspora lives simultaneously inside and outside of “home” and “homelessness,” being here (displaced and adopted) and there (exiled and distanced). As writer Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, argues, diaspora refuses to be integrated into a dominant language and culture and denied parts of themselves, such as accent and one’s history and cultural memory. Meanwhile, diaspora also flies from the cocoon of the mother tongue and journeys into adventurous encounters with other tongues, creating new communities rather than being bound to predetermined communities or fixed identities (2025).[3]
We cannot talk about climate change or social and environmental justice without confronting the ongoing genocide and ecocide in Palestine, the environmental disaster following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the erasure of Indigenous communities and forests in the Amazon and elsewhere—all exemplify the devastating consequences of global environmental and social injustices.[4] In particular, I believe, we cannot talk about anything, any change, and any future, if we avoid looking at and talking about Palestine: what has been happening to its people and land under an increasingly brutal Apartheid system of genocide, ecocide, siege and elimination of eco-human life and culture, imposed by a fully techno-weaponized modern state.
Once a terrible world is born through the deprivation, exploitation, and killing of one group of people by another—as in Nazism, colonialism, Apartheid, or dictatorship—its psyche, ideology, and whole mechanism continue to evolve and contaminate the world. It therefore becomes the obligation of everyone, and particularly of critical and creative minds, to resist it and to fight for justice and the rights of every being, human and non-human, with unwavering attention and sustained effort.
We should rethink our dear and precious life and world from the position of “bare life,” which designates the victims of the violence of sovereign power who are deprived of their rights to live as full human beings in every sense.[5] The deprived, abused, and threatened cherish the precious life more deeply; they preserve and shine the light of dignity of life more radiantly; and they hold tight to the faith in justice more adamantly. They are more human, and more humanly, than the abusers and those who support, tolerate, or comply with them. They fight for life with all their means; they fight for life with life itself. They fight for humanity. The “qualified life,” secured by killing others and by imposing segregation and deprivation, is not true life. Instead, it is soulless slavery that abandons humanity and being human together with other human and nonhuman beings.
Yan Zhou
January 2026
Notes
[1] The ancient Greek term chorographia (or chorography) derives from khoros, meaning place or region, and graphia, meaning writing or drawing. The term appears in the work Geography by the ancient Greek geographer Strabo and later reemerged during the Renaissance, notably in Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus. Interest in this form of study continued into the late eighteenth century, before the emergence of modern scientific disciplines. Strabo. Geography. Loeb Classical Library. Accessed via Internet Archive.
archive.org/details/Strabo08Geography17AndIndex Kircher, Athanasius. 1662. Mundus subterraneus. Amstelodami: Apud Joannem Janssonium à Waesberge & filios.
Buonanno, Rossella. 2014. The Stars of Galileo Galilei and the Universal Knowledge of Athanasius Kircher. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
[2] Watsuji, Tetsuro. 1961. A Climate: A Philosophical Study. Translated by Geoffrey Bownas. Tokyo: Printing Bureau, Japanese Government. Accessed via Internet Archive. archive.org/details/climatephilosoph0000wats_g9l6
Watsuji, Tetsuro. 2022. Intro / Climate & Culture. Introduced by Nathan Hohipuha. YouTube video, December 17, 2022. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxBjWtu-fU&t=13s
[3] Tawada, Yoko. 2025. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue. Translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation.
[4] Dinc, Pinar, and Necmettin Türk. 2025. “Roots of Destruction: Exploring the Genocide-Ecocide Nexus through the Destruction of Olive Trees in Occupied Palestine and Rojava.” The International Journal of Human Rights, August, 1–25. doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2025.2541756. IMEU (Institute for Middle East Understanding). 2022. “Fact Sheet: Israel’s Environmental Apartheid in Palestine.” November 3, 2022. imeu.org/resources/resources/fact-sheet-israels-environme....
Joseph, Lesley. 2025. “This Is What Ecocide Looks Like: Reflections on Israel’s War on the Environment in Gaza.” Journal of Palestine Studies 54 (2): 82–87. doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2025.2520728
Forensic Architecture. n.d. “Environmental Violence.” Accessed January 10, 2026. forensic-architecture.org/category/environmental-violence
[5] Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
artLAB Gallery Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
© 2026; Department of Visual Arts; Western University