Zhao Rongjie is a Chinese painter, visual artist, and videographer who studied oil painting and copperplate engraving at Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She lives in an ancient stone home in Dali, Yunnan Province, China.
Episode 5 of an ethnographic docuseries from Yunnan Province where efforts to rewild the ancestral homelands of ethnic Lisu have forced communities to give up hunting and traditional agriculture and instead seek alternative means of survival.
Episode 4 of an ethnographic docuseries from Tibetan Yunnan that explores the decisions communities face when modern development and environmental fragility converge.
Episode 3 of the ethnographic docuseries introduces three generations of Dai artisans who are preserving Hinayana Buddhist traditions and community identity through creative means.
Episode 2 of an ethnographic docuseries that explores agricultural traditions in one of Yunnan’s isolated, unrecognized ethnic minority communities.
Episode 1 of an ethnographic docuseries that examines the relationships between community, culture and seeds in southwest China.
Soon after the ban on public gatherings was lifted in China, Zhao Rongjie traveled to the capital of Sichuan Province to display two years of silkworm cocoon installations, mushroom spore prints, and embroidered silk tapestries.
Conceptual artist Zhao Rongjie brings the psychedelia of spore prints to film in an hypnotic visual collage of rare mycelia and symbolic natural (and unnatural) soundscapes.
In the mountains of southwest China, conceptual artist and director Zhao Rongjie meets a husband and wife team of mushroom hunters who welcome her into their home and introduce her to a simpler, antiquated world of physical labour, spiritual inheritance, and symbiosis with nature.
Conceptual artist Zhao Rongjie chronicles daily life on Jizu Mountain, as she helps her local hosts Da Ge and Da Sao harvest walnuts and mushrooms to sell at the weekly market.
In the mountains of Yunnan Province, near China’s southwestern frontiers, conceptual artist Zhao Rongjie has spent months collecting and documenting rare endemic fungus species with local mushroom hunters.
In early 2020, visual artist Zhao Rongjie cocooned herself in her home in the mountains of southwest China and raised 1,000 silkworms over two months, creating a series of videos, cocoon artworks, and silk embroidery as she underwent her own process of metamorphosis.
