Beijing sci-art panel explores 60-year project to interpret life

A sci-art panel discussion was held on Aug 8 in Beijing's 798 Art Zone. Experts across literature and art, science, curating, education, intellectual property and the internet gathered at the exhibition hall of the Art Bridge Gallery for an in-depth discussion on the creative core of the "212 Movement" art exhibit, the integration of science and art, and related themes.

Hosted as part of the "212 Movement World Exploration Initiative", the panel opened with documentary director Li Qing introducing the overall framework of PNSO's 60-year work plan. After meeting artist Zhao Chuang and writer Yang Yang in 2009, Li helped launch PNSO, an organization devoted to the research and creation of scientific art, in 2010, kicking off the "PNSO Scientific Art Projects Plan: Stories on Earth (2010–2070)". Their achievements span painting, sculpture, science art and literature, with Zhao creating the visual forms and Yang developing narrative cores grounded in scientific deduction. Li noted that prior to PNSO's founding, foreign researchers had predominantly led the creation of fossil life images in domestic paleontological academic exchanges. Leveraging China's rich fossil resources and rapid academic progress, PNSO used dinosaurs as a breakthrough subject, producing extensive works that earned widespread social acclaim.

Scientific artist Zhao Chuang compared reconstructing ancient life to solving a crime: using physical fossils and scientific tools such as electron microscopes to examine remnant traces, he infers past life forms, textures, and colors, resorting to reasonable speculation only where science lacks definitive answers.

Author of science books for children Yang Yang shared her narrative approach, emphasizing the need to thoroughly master scientific principles before establishing credible behavioral motivations for each creature, ensuring the characters hold up to scrutiny.

Guests then explored the dialectical relationship between science and art. Curator and art historian Gao Yuan noted that during the Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti was among the first to pioneer linear perspective using mathematics and geometry, while Leonardo da Vinci performed human dissections and Michelangelo studied anatomical structures for his sculpture. These artistic practices were themselves origins of modern science, proving that in specific contexts, art is science.

Host Liu Sanlei remarked that the plan's most moving quality is how it proves that, in an age obsessed with speed, people are still willing to spend a lifetime asking what the world is.