e-flux Notes publishes Zairong Xiang’s unrealized proposal for the 37th Bienal de São Paulo (2027), in which he imagines inversion as a condition for collective flourishing. Curatorial proposals rarely reach a wider readership, yet they can be works of thought and literary composition in their own right, with a life beyond the exhibitions they imagine. This proposal has been slightly shortened for publication.
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The imagery of the topsy-turvy world has been frequently invoked in recent months to describe our turbulent times, which have seen increasing violence, genocide, ecological degradation, ever widening inequality, the grotesque operation of neoliberal capital, and the right-wing appropriation of progressive tactics of the left. Antipodes of each other, Brazil and China— South America and East Asia—can be seen as each other’s inversion: where “todo o mundo é invertido” (the whole world is upside down) as the Carioca Madame Satã quips about China, the “furthest place on earth.” Unlike the chaotic connotations often associated with the “upside-down world,” the I Ching (Book of Changes) understands cosmic inversion as the condition for flourishing. Its hexagram Tai of the great prosperity places the earth (represented by three open yin _ _ lines) above the sky (represented by three continuous yang __ lines). Standing anywhere on the spherical earth, there is always a sky below. São Paulo, where I hope to curate the upcoming Bienal, and Shanghai, where I am currently based, and where I cocurated the previous edition of the biennial, are linked by more than their serpentine initial letter. S traces a Taichi-like shape across the globe, an image that suggests movement and mutual transformation rather than fixed, binary oppositions. Seen this way, the relationship between São Paulo and Shanghai forms a South-South axis shaped by relational positioning that could unsettle older, racialized polarities such as Europe/white versus Africa/Black, recasting the two cities as intermediate points within the radical hybridity connecting Asia and the Americas. The upside-down Tai is understood here as an ancient prophecy and queer promise projected onto our current topsy-turvy world and its turbulent transition from the dying old order into a novo tempo.
The World Upside Down | O mundo invertido via hexagram Tai is the key heuristic of my proposal for the 37th Bienal de São Paulo. It is both the organizing principle (a cosmography) and the curatorial vision (a cosmology). The imagery conjures up critical examinations of a deeply wounded world of racial capitalism and colonial modernity, but also unexpected affinities across space and time, of cosmologies that intuit, inquire into, and influence the working of the world, and the fragile but indispensable promises of cosmic and societal flourishing. The 37th Bienal de São Paulo will foreground the understudied history and potential of the mutually inverted and antipodally intimate world of the Americas and Asia. It will be a nonlocal affirmation of solidarity, abundance, and life, bypassing the North Atlantic consensus on liberal representational justice in art and queer politics, tracing fugitive currents of desire, translation, and unexpected affinities […] The biennial will mirror the hexagramic lines by splitting into six interconnected scenes:
_ _ Earth Heaven
_ _ Inverts United
_ _ Body Chamber
___ Viewing
___ Gardening
___ Dislocating
1. Earth Heaven, or Parabolicamará-mente Tai
Ê volta do mundo, camará
Ê, ê, mundo dá volta, camará
—Gilberto Gil, Parabolicamará天地交而万物通，上下交而其志同
Heaven and Earth Interact and the Ten Thousand Things Flourish; what is below and what is above intermingle and their wills become one.
—Hexagram Tai, I Ching
The image of a world upside down is both a description and critique of the turbulent contemporary world. It is most importantly also a cosmological proposition to imagine alternatives, a flourishing future informed by antipodal connections, as well as an ancient text that has survived the changing times: Tai of the I Ching (or Book of Changes), which has also influenced artists from across the world, including several Brazilian artists and writers. Unlike most cosmological, religious, and philosophical imagery that equates the image of an inverted world with that of spiritual chaos and capitalist perversion, hexagram Tai’s inverted heaven and earth describes a great cosmic and societal flourishing.1 The “natural order” has been reversed.
The original cosmographies of this flourishing Tai: the images of Hetuo and Luoshu (10–2 century BC) place South above and North below, resembling, across time and space, Joaquín Torres García’s famous América Invertida (1943), which Guatemalan-Chinese artist Esvin Alarcón Lam further inverts (or perverts) as Amarica: América Invertida (2019), punning on the queer connotations of inversion. Cosmological charts become political contestations. The first scene (which can also be seen as the last, in the spirit of inversion—see the sixth scene below) will take seriously these cosmopolitical lessons that set in motion the inverting perspectives that will inform the clima of the biennial.
For a Chinese curator with scholarly, linguistic, and emotional ties to Latin America, working alongside a culturally heterogeneous team to curate the Bienal de São Paulo, it is important to bypass—without ignoring—the North Atlantic consensus in contemporary art and queer politics, which continues to reify essentialist identity politics through tokenism and liberal diversity and inclusion. Benevolent representational justice, while appeasing the culturalist governmentality of DEI, continues to burden the sexually, racially, and economically marginalized to do the labor, to represent themselves and themselves only. The (inadvertent) result of this is a politics that denies mobility while policing and even proliferating borders that ultimately serve to keep us in our places. As Mafalda’s friend Libertad rightly puts it, facing an “inverted” map: “That the hemispheric north is the one above is a psychological trick invented by those who believe themselves to be above so that we continue to believe that we are below.” For the Indigenous Lil’Wat Nation, power comes from below: The closer one can squat to the ground, the more power one can draw out. In the Nahua cosmos, the supreme deity of duality, ometeotl, who resides in the highest heaven above, should in tlalxicco ónoc (spread from the navel of the earth).2
2. Inverts United, or Genealogies of the Southern Queers
A China fica do outro lado do mundo. Na China, todo o mundo é invertido, quem aqui é preto lá é branco, quando aqui é dia lá é noite.
—Madame Satã in Karim Aïnouz, Madame Satã
The accusation of “disrespecting the natural order” has been cross-culturally used to justify homo- and transphobic attacks against queers: “inverti/e” in French, “invertido/a” in Spanish, “invertito/a” in Italian, and “invertido” or “(trans-/des-)viado” in Portuguese. The fact that one of the most ancient cosmological texts, the I Ching, puts faith in the inverted for cosmic flourishing could be regarded as a fierce critique of the baseless confidence in heteronormative centrality in the order of things, and the liberal/secular presentist equating of “tradition” with “homophobia,” and therefore all its civilizational-feminist, homonationalist, Islamophobic variants.
The argot for “queer” in the Chinese-speaking world is tongzhi, a term originally used to designate communist comrade—tongzhi literally means “shared will.” As if the complicity of the inverted world with the world of the inverted reached out across time and space, tongzhi can trace its origin to the ancient judgment of hexagram Tai,3 and resonates strongly with Gilberto Gil’s meditation on technology and tradition on his album Parabolicamará. By merging the parabolica (the antenna that connects every corner of Brazil to the world of television) with camará, practitioners of Afro-Brazilian capoeira should take a route around the world to China.4
Camará-comrade needs to be situated in the usage of tongzhi as queer argot in 1989, the year of liberal triumphalism that launched the aggressive neoliberalization of the world but therefore also the persistence of the Cold War, which has seen a strong reemergence and hot resonance in recent years. When the antipodal East Asia / South America form the inverted world of the inverted, the triumphalist narrative of queer liberation (always told through origin stories of/in the North) needs to be thoroughly questioned.5 Pax Americana means bellum americanum for many, including the concrete experience of the Cold War in East Asia, genocide in Palestine, the civilian-military coup in Brazil, not to mention the recent illegal abduction of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro by the US.
The inverted world of the inverted urges us to tell different stories of queer struggles: from Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s early yet little-accounted-for theoretical usage of “queer,” to Cuban Severo Sarduy’s transvestites and their well-dressed revolution; from the Neapolitan femminielli’s mezzogiorno political theology to Chilean Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis’ anti-imperial and anti-archival artivism, to the intersectional queer resistance against racist hetero-patriarchy, military dictatorship, and capitalist cooption in Brazilian art. The genealogies that link the black madonnas of the Italian South (femminielli’s Virgin di Montevergine) and Brazil (Nossa Senhora Aparecida), via the brown Virgen de Guadalupe (a key reference for many chicana/o artists), will shed a different light on the rich historical and living archives of sexual dissidents in the antipodal Souths that have been often misunderstood, filtered-through, or overshadowed by North Atlantic Euroamerican experience and expression.6
3. Body Chamber: From Camará to Camera Obscura
4. Viewing: Changing (the) World
It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things.
— Karl Marx, Das KapitalI have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin.
Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.
— Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
Written together, the third and fourth scenes in the middle of the hexagramic mutation are emphatically porous, as they connect and transit between the yin and the yang spheres. The third scene takes its cue from Tai’s medical theory of the healthy state of the body as a “body-of-orifices,” divided/joined by the philtrum. The three upper open yin lines symbolize three pairs of orifices: eyes, ears, and nostrils. The three lower full yang lines symbolize three single orifices: mouth, genitals, and anus.7 Like the capoeira movement of the historically criminalized and marginalized body, Tai’s macro-cosmic inversion of heaven and earth is grounded in the minor, the local, the minute, and queer orifices of the body, the porous openness that religious and secular authorities across time and space attempt to regulate. Reshuffling our relation to each other and the world, the body-of-orifices is at odds with the phallic individual (conquistador, extractivist, consumer), the genius-hero mythos (artist, curator, caudillo), cultural puritanism, and the border regime. The porous body is a cave and a translucent pavilion. The inverted world of the Souths reaches down to the inner chambers, the underworld, the mine, and the mythologized inferno.
In the turn and overturn of the parabolic-antenna’s azimuthal tilting and capoeira camará’s aú kicking, unexpected affinities are found: “camará” is the Afro-Brazilian variant of the marxist term “comrade,” whose Chinese equivalent tongzhi is used to mean both communist comrade and homosexual. Etymologically rooted in camarada, a chamber, camará, unexpectedly yields to the quintessential modern cosmo-technics of representation: photography’s camera obscura which sees the world first as an inverted one. This “false consciousness” or distorted mediation has captivated Marxist thinkers, who use it as a metaphor to criticize capitalist perversion and the inversion of social relations. Karl Marx already described the upside-down world of capitalism by invoking the camera obscura.8 Yet challenges to the understanding of photography as an inverted or false mediation of social relations have found several Brazilian occasions of theoretical, artistic, and also political disagreement, notably by Vilem Flusser and the lesser-known photographer Lang Jinshan.
Lang visited a replica Chinese garden called Badeyuan (or O Jardim das Oito Virtudes) built in Mogi das Cruzes by his fellow Chinese expatriate painter Zhang Daqian. Zhang crafted this garden during his nineteen years of residence in Brazil, allowing Lang to construct photographic “landscape paintings” balancing photography’s opposite ontological inclinations: light and shadow (photo-graphy in European languages understood as writing/painting with light; whereas in East Asia as 摄影: capturing shadow). Through his signature composite photography (a technique that combines printing and other darkroom methods to create ink-painting style photography), Lang pushed forward the transmutation of the literati painting from its architectural translation of the traditional garden to that of modern photography. His composite photography recycles and borrows photographed scenes to create new worlds that resemble the old ones. Together with other garden-crafting strategies, “borrowing scenery” (借景) constructs a “shifting perspective at every moving step” (移步换景). Often painted on long scrolls, the viewing process resembles walking through the literati garden where one would have constant kinetic viewpoints framed and reframed by corridors and windows. One of Zhang’s masterpieces is the twenty-meter-long scroll Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangtze (1968), produced in his paulista garden. The inverted world of South America captured through the inverted camera obscura is reassembled to assimilate the world of Chinese literati of eleventh century. A resemblance that cuts across and recycles distant time and space is the conceptual node behind the implicit lineage from the literati garden to modern and contemporary photography and moving image.
Perspective-shifting is not only an aesthetic pleasure of embodied experience but also a political method, which Oscar Niemeyer—the architect of the biennial’s pavilion—championed through his lyric curves and permeable thresholds, against bureaucratic and authoritative “straight angles.” It’s an aesthetico-political gesture of not assuming the external, God-like colonial position typical of “linear perspective” and its modern/colonial cousins: linear time, linear progress, historic teleology, “end of history,” or even “critique.” It is worth noting that Chinese critics of the eighteenth century, while praising the technical virtuosity of European painters, also criticized their treatment of living people like dead corpses. Shifting perspectives, in perfect coherence with the medical theory of vitality and body-of-orifices, was more appropriate to capturing life and liveliness.9
Inversion sets in motion (formal and political) points of view, which lead to religious, ceremonial, pedagogic methods that intentionally shift perspectives, like carnival inversions or shamanic sense-shape shifting. What would happen if Amerindian perspectivism, which has redefined the culture-nature divide, met Zhuangzi’s daoist relativity, which radically decenters anthropological disposition? Perspective-shifting will be a crucial component of both the embodied experience of the exhibition and the educational public programs through workshops, écoles de la nuit, performances, and film screenings.
5. Gardening: On Replica, Borrowing, (Re)Stealing, and the Biennale Architecture
Inversion takes a highly aestheticized form in Chinese literati gardens, where what is natural should look intentional and artificial and what is artificial should look spontaneous and natural;10 where specific stones found in nature are repurposed as rockery named “false mountains” or jiashan; where sceneries from nature and the artificial world are constantly borrowed from one another to form infinite views as one strolls down the gardens’ labyrinthine forking paths. The authenticity-artificiality inversion informs both the elegant traditional literati garden and the clumsy contemporary assemblage known as shanzhai (similar to, but not the same as gambiarra). In them, objects assume a defiance against their assigned commodity value, proper places, and ontological boundaries. The world(view) of exuberant improvisation, despite or because of the socioeconomic precarity of marginalized communities of the global majority, embodies a cosmology of openness, pervasion, and permission, where “proper” boundaries are constantly negotiated, ignored, overcome, or inverted to guarantee a hexagram, Tai-like, porous cosmos of intermingling flourishing.
By revisiting, reimagining, or even reconstructing Zhang Daqian’s shanzhai-garden Badeyuan, this scene will resituate the much-debated gambiarra theory and practice in Brazilian art in the wider context of both the Global South’s cosmotechnics and neoliberal precarization as critique and strategy. It will also inform the architectonics of the biennial in the recycling of materials, improvisation, and cocreation with those behind the scene: art handlers, architects, staff, and other workers.
The Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in the garden of Ibirapuera Park is an ideal location for cross-fertilization between Niemeyer’s open architecture of curves and the porous literati garden. Underlying these highly aestheticized and formal experiments through composition and repurposing is the issue of scarcity. Built often in the middle of the city (like the biennial pavilion), the literati garden has limited space. To conjugate an environment of nature and wilderness with spatial concerns (if not economic austerity), “borrowing scenery” becomes a quintessential technique.11 Famous for his virtuosity in classical landscape painting, Zhang Daqian is also infamously known as an excellent forger of masters and masterpieces. Yet “forgery” shares with “borrowing” the same Chinese word, jia, or “fake” (a heavily connoted word in English). For example, the signature rockery mentioned above is called jia shan, “fake mountain.” The meaning of “fake” is only derivative of jia’s primary meaning of “to borrow.” The ultimate borrowing is the human-made artificial crafting that borrows from nature’s spontaneity, not unlike Niemeyer’s architectonic borrowing of Brazil’s undulating landscape.
The cosmotechnics of shanzhai finds its southern cousins with different accents in Brazilian gambiarra, Indian jugaad, Jamaican sound system, Native American rez, and Chicano rasquache. Fake/jia/borrowing becomes a liberating principle of assemblage and assembling of distant histories, peoples, and struggles in constant movement.12 This possibility emerges from a cosmology of radical porosity and permeability where the world is infinitely linked. We are not sure if physicist David Bohm had seen gambiarra during his exile in Brazil after escaping from McCarthyism, but his quantum theory says it all: “There is a nonlocal connection which can, in principle, make even distant objects into a single system.”13
If, in the literati garden, borrowing flirts with falsification, in the colonial situation stealing plays a double role. The quintessential colonial garden, namely the plantation, stole Indigenous land and culture, naturalized as virgin terra nullius and a “natural resource,” a notion still prevalent today; while Indigenous, Black, Asian, and other “wounded captive bodies in the scene of subjugation” were stolen and commodified.14 The arsonist looting of the Summer Palace, a cosmopolitan garden of the Qing court in Beijing, remains in Chinese collective memory as poignant evidence of the cruelty and greed of colonial power, as well as the rotten incompetence of the imperial order. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harny put it by borrowing from Pistol (Henry V): “To the university I’ll steal.” In this dialectics, the celebrated ingenious improvisation and radical hospitality of shanzhai/gambiarra will be contextualized in the colonial maneuver of naturalization and the historical and continuous Afro-Asian solidarity, transnational environmental activism, and other translocal coalitions and resistances. The interrogation of the condition of possibility cannot render the infrastructure transparent (the usual approach of the much criticized “white box”). The biennial pavilion itself will be treated as an active participant in the World Upside Down | O mundo invertido.
6. Dislocating: Turning and Overturning
反者，道之动；弱者，道之用。天下万物生于有，有生于无。
Reversal, opposition: the activity of the Dao. Weakness, fragility: the functioning of the Dao.
—Lao Zi, chap. 40 of the DaodejingTo breach this projected Line/Divide of co-humanity would necessarily call for Western and westernized academics/intellectuals to effect their/our own Autopoetic Turn/Overturn. For such a turn would force them/us to accept the relativization of their/our own “part science, part myth” origin-story … by correctly identifying this narration as that empirically of mankind rhetorically overrepresented as if it were that of humankind.
—Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)cognition”
In the spirit of inversion, the last scene of the biennial is also the first. It looks into both the critique of the topsy-turvy present and the imagination of flourishing futures. Tai’s immanent ten thousand things in orgiastic intercourse between constitutive opposites resonates with what Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter via Rastafarianism calls “turn/overturn.” Turning the world upside down as a cosmo-political intervention is only possible when the constitutive parts move, moving away from their “proper place” and “self-identity.” Movement and migration are fundamental. It is the quintessential queer gesture. Only by elevating what is constitutively minor to a superior position, and by lowering what is constitutively major to an inferior position, could the cosmic intercourse generate the flourishing ten thousand things. When naturalized hierarchy is observed, the inverted hexagram Tai becomes Pi—the Great Stagnation. This scene sets the politics of the biennial: critical of any form of cosmological, ontological, and cultural essentialism, of the overreliance on identitarian authenticity in contemporary cultural, artistic, and political milieus. It is a conscious movement away from the individual self as an ethical commitment and a political strategy of the (under)commons to imagine and enable collective survival and flourishing.
The opposite of the hexagram Tai, in which the sky is above and the earth below—everything in its proper place—is Pi, the Great Stagnation: order without movement, hierarchy without exchange. Ji Cheng, the author of Yuanye (The Craft of Gardens) where we (and maybe also Zhang Daqian) have learnt about gardening, took the courtesy name Wupi (无否, “no Pi”), a deliberate negation of this condition. Rather than accepting an order that looks natural but produces blockage and decline, Wupi suggests inversion as a strategy for renewal. It is tempting to read this choice biographically: a failed literati-official, Ji Cheng may have imagined gardening itself as reversing stagnation and restoring, through careful rearrangement, the personal, societal, and cosmic flourishing enabled by the inverted heaven and earth.
The I Ching contains sixty-four hexagrams composed of free combinations of the yin and yang lines that form eight types of trigrams, whose free coupling further forms the hexagrams. Hexagram Tai is one of the sixty-four hexagrams. Tai, the ideal of a dynamic stability, includes the all-yin trigram (kun, earth), which has the propensity to descend, placed on top of the all-yang lower trigram (qian, sky), which transcends. In Tai, kun is situated above qian, earth and heaven placed upside down.
I have explored the dynamics of the Nahua cosmos in my book Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books, 2018).
The commentary of judgment states: “天地交而萬物通，上下交而其志同” (Heaven and Earth interact perfectly, and the ten thousand things communicate without obstacle; those above and those below interact perfectly and their wills become one.)
“lá em Macau, havia um garoto português que ensinava capoeira para garotos angolanos. O mundo certamente dá muitas voltas e se torna cada vez mais complexo.” In the same text, Gilberto moved on to think beyond identitarian constrains of gender/sexuality, race, and spirituality: “E na minha condição de homem, reconheci minha metade mulher; na de heterossexual, vislumbrei minha sensibilidade homo; na de negro, exaltei minh’alma de todas as cores, na de crente, abracei o credo de todos os deuses.”
In either New York’s Stonewall Riots or the academic coinage of “queer theory” which has been profoundly Eurocentric; in the theoretical monopoly of European thinkers and imperialist collaboration in terms of queer liberalism and homonationalism (pink-washing: a salient example being an Israeli soldier waving a rainbow flag over the ruins of Gaza).
It is not a coincidence that the sexual scandal of “Sister Hong” went particularly viral in Latin America and Southeast Asia. This queer-gambiarra “identity” and the very action of seduction and nonconsensual filming and distribution have provoked scandal, moral panic, and indeed legal consequences in an era following decades of queer mainstreaming, for retaining the unapologetically grotesque and amoral character of queerness. Camará Madame Satã continues as a Nanjing malandro. Se “não existe pecado ao sul do Equador,” (Matogrosso) também não na China onde “todo o mundo é invertido.”
I have written extensively on this. See for example Zairong Xiang, “Transdualism: Towards a Materio-Discursive Embodimentm” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 3 (2018); and “We Need to Talk about the Penis,” philoSOPHIA 14, no. 1 (2024).
In Das Kapital, capitalism is described as “an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things” (chap. 48 of Volume III, 1894). Here, the highly heteronormative description of masculine capital and feminine earth is said to be “perverted,” a word that often tinkers with the queerphobic slur that equates queerness with inversion and perversion (both “verkehrt” in the German).
For an elaboration on this, see Dong Lihui, Imperial Portraits and Truth: The Transformation of Visual Culture in Modern China (1840–1920) (Sanlian, 2024).
The ultimate aesthetics of the literati garden is “wrought by human hands, yet appearing as a work of nature” (虽由人作，宛自天开).
As Yuanye, the seventeenth-century treaty on The Craft of Gardens states: “Now the borrowing of view is the most important factor in gardens. Its technics include for example distant borrowing, adjacent borrowing, upward borrowing, downward borrowing, and borrowing in response to the seasons. Attracted by the nature of things, as one’s eyes perceive, one’s heart anticipates, just as (in painting) the idea precedes the brush, and only then can one depict exhaustively” (trans. Stanislaus Fung). See also Gao Jianghan, “‘Borrowed Scenery’ Technique in Classical Chinese Gardens,” Chinese Social Sciences Today, March 16, 2021.
“A junção de partes e itens em conjuntos complicados, não porque preencham qualquer projeto ideal, mas simplesmente porque são possíveis” F. Varela et al., A mente corpórea: Ciência cognitiva e experiência humana (Instituto Piaget, 2001.)
David Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (Routledge, 1993), 352.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022).
