Lileas Meng
Programme:
Landscape Architecture - MPhil/PhD
Start date:
September 2024
Mode of study:
Full time
Biography
I am a research artist/architect who works with space not only as a subject of inquiry, but also as a way of thinking through memory, contested histories and ecological change. My practice moves between investigating how experiences are navigated, recorded, reconstructed and imagined through embodied experience and technical mediation with(in) human-more-than-human entanglement.
Working with fieldwork, archives, drawing, moving image, digital environments and installation, I treat artistic making as part of the research process rather than simply a means of presenting its findings. Currently, I am particularly interested in how different techniques and forms of representation produce what becomes visible, knowable or remembered, and how they might open up alternative, sometimes contradictory, ways of understanding the world.
Before beginning my research at the University of Edinburgh, I graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA_City Design, 2023) and Nanjing University of the Arts (BDes_Art & Technologies/Display Design, 2022).
Research interests
- Transdisciplinary Situated Research
- Critical Cartography, Mapping and Spatial Representation
- More-Than-Human Geographies
- Participatory Approaches in Eveyday Life
- Game Engine and VR-Based Approaches
My doctoral research investigates the transformation of riverine landscapes along the Yangtze River within China's ten-year fishing ban. Through the situated knowledge and lived experiences of fishing communities, I examine how ecological governance reshapes relationships between people, water, and more-than-human life, alongside the everyday practices and cultural memories embedded in these landscapes.
Drawing on critical landscape studies, environmental humanities, and more-than-human approaches, I develop a practice-based methodology that brings together ethnographic fieldwork, embodied surveys, participatory mapping, drawing, and moving-image practices.
Through this research, I attempt to explore how marginalised knowledge, everyday experiences, and spectral ecological memories might challenge dominant representations of landscape transformation and open up alternative ways of understanding and imagining riverine futures.