Zhai Qiutong is a Chinese-born artist, writer and researcher based in Singapore. She contemplates human relationship with the surrounding by recognizing the scale of geological time and the non-linear cycles of time across beings outside the human-centric colonial perception of time. She works on hybrid and interdisciplinary projects that combine emotional responses with natural phenomena, understanding her role as artist to formulate relationships and observations that concern earthly temporalities and ecological affects. She works with soil, maps, fungi, seaweed, diagrams, rocks and drawings that meditate on our shared relationships to this planet, through processes of collecting, assembling, deep listening and storytelling. Her material-based artistic approach often takes shape as a lively compost heap, where each ingredient is a non-definable knowledge pot, cultivating artistic forms and ideas in a symbiotic way. Zhai uses her installation and writings as a tool to hold space for audiences to imagine new, non-linear narratives of the larger-than-human world that look into simultaneously the past and the future.

Zhai is a member of the Composting Knowledge Network and an artist in residence at lumbung: documenta fifteen. She has worked with communities across Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, Germany and the UK, documenting oral histories of ancestral knowledge and caretaking spaces of conversation and connecting knots. Her work has been exhibited in Shodoshima, London, Kassel and Singapore. Her contributions to Arts and Humanities publications include a special issue of Object Lessons Space and bylines with Art & Market. Zhai completed her BA in Arts and Humanities from Yale-NUS College and is an affiliate alumnus at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.