In late 2019, a patient with unspecified pneumonia was diagnosed with a novel coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan. After investigation, the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was identified as the “Ground Zero” site of COVID-19. The virus has been spread rapidly through various travel means; hence the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020. Since then, countries around the world have announced a state of emergency and restriction rules such as lockdowns and curfews. By the end of 2021, Taiwan has not opened its national borders yet. Despite the relatively high vaccine coverage, the number of infected people in Europe and the United States continues has not ceased to increase in the face of anti-vaxxers and Covid denier demonstrations. However, Latvia reimposes strict lockdown as the first country in Europe’s new wave of Covid due to the low vaccination rate. Austria’s chancellor even has to warn the unvaccinated that they could face a new lockdown. The ongoing apocalyptic landscape reveals that the pandemic has unveiled not only the limits of civilization and medical sciences but also the difficulty of biopolitical governance.

With the current COVID-19 background, this project attempts to take the humanistic and ethical core of bio art as the point of departure to investigate how contemporary artists confront the human predicament and crisis in the apocalyptic landscape. In the context of the convergence of art, technology, and science, can we employ artistic practices to encapsulate ethical issues that science has not been able to reach? And, can artists propose alternative guidelines for survival through their creative and critical thinking?