Contested Life in Bioart: A Daoist-Inspired Inquiry into Xing-Shen Ju Miao, Living Matter, and Technological...

Contemporary bioart uses living tissues, genetic sequences, microbial systems, synthetic organisms, and biofabricated materials as artistic media. In doing so, it makes living matter publicly visible as something that can be cultivated, modified, displayed, maintained, and terminated. These practices unsettle familiar distinctions between organism and artefact, human and nonhuman, nature and technology, artistic creation and biological intervention. This article examines such controversies through the Daoist expression xing-shen ju miao (), understood here as the mutually wondrous co-constitution of embodied form, vital-spiritual efficacy, and qi () within a processual cosmology of transformation. It does not claim that the artists discussed consciously draw on Daoist thought, nor does it classify their work as Daoist art. Instead, it develops Daoist ethical resources as a supplementary, cross-cultural mode of bioethical inquiry. The argument is that these resources can redirect discussion from the policing of categorical boundaries toward relational transformation, technological humility, distributed agency, and responsibility for the consequences of intervention. Bioartistic controversy is therefore not treated as a problem to be resolved by a Daoist answer but as a productive public site in which the meanings of life, vulnerability, agency, and responsibility remain open to deliberation. In this framework, qi is neither a mystical substance nor a measurable regulatory standard. It functions as an ethical-poetic concept for thinking about vitality, dependence, interdependence, maintenance, decay, and responsible transformation both within and beyond art.