Michelle Lewis-King
PhD, MIICT

My practice is cross-disciplinary, bringing together Chinese medicine, contemporary art, embodied knowledge, philosophy of technology, and perception studies into a coherent field of inquiry shaped by clinical work. At its core, it explores how different knowledge systems construct the body, and how these constructions inform perception, diagnosis, and care.

My inquiry began at Chelsea College of Arts in the mid-1990s, where an MA in Fine Art under Helen Chadwick established a lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between the body, knowledge, and the technical systems cultures develop to interpret both. Chadwick's practice, rigorous, sensorial, and intellectually precise, offered a model of art as a mode of enquiry into how life is framed by scientific, medical, and cultural forms of perception.

A subsequent PgDip in the History and Theory of Modern and Contemporary Art deepened this trajectory, framing art and science not as separate disciplines that occasionally intersect, but as a continuous field of practice in which different modes of inquiry generate interrelated and complex forms of knowledge.

I completed a BSc (Hons) in Chinese Medicine: Acupuncture at the University of Westminster under the clinical direction of Cinzia Scorzon, whose approach to diagnosis combined rigorous clinical observation with close engagement with classical Chinese medical texts. Her supervision was formative in shaping how I read the body in the clinic, particularly in relation to subtle diagnostic signs often underemphasised in contemporary training.

Postgraduate training in Chinese Herbal Medicine followed under Professor Volker Scheid - a renowned scholar-practitioner of Chinese medicine - grounded my practice in a mode of scholarship that treats classical Chinese medicine as a living intellectual and artistic clinical system rather than a historical archive. This clinical and textual grounding remains central to The Listening Clinic, where diagnosis is approached as an evolving interpretive practice.

My clinical work began in 2006 with the opening of Blue Orchid Arts Acupuncture Clinic in Frome, Somerset — a practice that already reflected an integration of clinical work and artistic inquiry. An earlier clinical internship at the Marylebone Health Centre under Arnold Desser provided an important counterpoint, offering direct experience of Chinese medicine within an NHS clinical environment and its dialogue with biomedical systems.

Between 2009 and 2011, alongside doctoral research, a parallel formation took place through direct engagement with medicinal plants. At the Asian Garden of the University of California Botanical Garden - the first botanical garden in the United States to cultivate Chinese medicinal species as part of a cultural exchange with China – my work under horticulturist Elaine Sedlack brought the Materia Medica into close sensory attention and deepened understanding.

At the Chinese Medicinal Herb Farm in Petaluma, California, run by Peg Schafer, the same plants were encountered through the lens of cultivation: through understanding their growth and harvesting cycles, their ecological relationships, and the practical knowledge required to bring them from soil to dispensary.

These experiences fundamentally shifted my understanding of Chinese herbal medicine. The Materia Medica ceased to be a catalogue of plant entries and became, a living field of organisms, at times numinous - even divine. Each plant carries its own ecology, history, and medicinal intelligence, which I have come to know through years of embodied practice, attention, and clinical perception. This perspective continues to inform both my clinical work and ongoing research into plant bioelectrical organisation and potential affinities with meridian systems—one of the central research threads of my current practice.

I held roles as Senior Lecturer and later Professor at DeTao Masters Academy, Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts under art and technology pioneer Roy Ascott in his Technoetics Studio, and as Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Creativity and Innovation, UCA–Xiamen University.

Living and working in China for many years profoundly deepened my relationship with Chinese medicine. While Chinese medicine is now a global practice, studying and practising within the culture that nurtured it offered a different kind of understanding—one shaped not only by classical texts and clinical methods, but by everyday language, philosophy, seasonal life, food culture, and conversations with practitioners for whom the medicine remains part of a living tradition. This experience continues to inform my practice, where I move between the worlds of Chinese medicine, contemporary art, and interdisciplinary research.

During my time in Roy Ascott's Technoetics Studio, a meeting with philosopher Yuk Hui in Shanghai in 2018 led to the co-initiation of the ACT (Art, Chinese Medicine, Technics) Symposium at the University of Chicago Beijing Center the following year. The symposium brought together my doctoral research into the relationships between art, Chinese medicine, and technology with Yuk Hui's development of cosmotechnics: the idea that different civilisations cultivate distinct technical traditions, each expressing particular relationships between cosmos, ethics, and human creativity.

This dialogue reinforced an understanding that continues to inform my clinical practice. Chinese medicine is not simply an alternative interpretation of the same biological reality described by biomedicine, nor a historical precursor to it. It is a coherent medical tradition with its own philosophical foundations, diagnostic logic, and therapeutic methods. Appreciating its depth requires engaging with its concepts on their own terms while remaining open to dialogue with contemporary science and other systems of knowledge.

My PhD was carried out on a competitive doctoral fellowship with the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, undertaken through Cambridge School of Art (2011–2017). Titled Pulse Project: A Sonic Investigation Across Bodies, Cultures, and Technology, the research was grounded in the digital humanities and approached its questions through art, science, and technology studies, formalising more than a decade of practice-based enquiry into the relationships between Chinese medicine, sound, technology, and embodied knowledge. The project was published in journals including Technoetic Arts, Digital Creativity, and Journal of Sonic Studies, and approached pulse diagnosis not only as a clinical method but also as a practice of deep listening, investigating how the perceptual skills cultivated through Chinese medicine might be translated into artistic research.

From this work emerged Qiscapes, an instrument and live performance practice that maps acupuncture points and meridian pathways in real time, translating the body's energetic relationships into sound. Presented at venues including the University of Chicago Beijing Center, Tongji FabLab Shanghai, the Roy Ascott Studios, and the Centre for European Art in Xiamen, Qiscapes asks a simple but profound question: how might the body be experienced differently when understood through the relational logic of the meridian system rather than solely through the anatomical structures of biomedicine?

Across my research, performance, and clinical work, the same question continues to guide my practice: how can contemporary technologies help us perceive aspects of the body that Chinese medicine has described for centuries without reducing them to purely mechanical or biomedical models? My current research extends this inquiry to medicinal plants, exploring whether their bioelectrical organisation may offer structural analogies with meridian physiology and contribute to new ways of thinking about plant intelligence, medicine, and ecological relationships.