The Orchid House(name TBD) 2023-present
Black and white photo
Black and white photo
Orchid house started with a room in my grandmother’s house in the middle of Taiwan. This is a small space, an addition to the main house originally constructed by my grandfather for the purposes of growing and tending orchids. The orchid room has always held for me a quiet intimacy of family, memory, and daily ritual. However, when I lived in Chicago and began to notice orchids in my daily life frequently, and began to see them everywhere. In grocery stores, in botanical garden, or as a nice gift, these plants were also symbols of the tropics and exotica. They triggered an uncanny sense of recognition in me that was belied by a feeling of geographic and cultural displacement.
I found myself wanting to trace the histories behind these plants. Did Chicago have its own native orchids? Were the orchids in my grandmother’s orchid room “local” to Taiwan, and how did they get there? I soon realized that what I had assumed to be markers of home had been formed by far more extensive histories of global trade, horticultural exchange, and colonial botany.
In this project, I explore this tension between the affective force of personal memory and the unfolding, larger stories we might find in plants. I am interested in how these plants have moved around the world, how they have been named, and how ideas of the “tropical” or “Asian” are constructed, circulated, and eventually naturalized. Returning to my grandmother’s orchid room, with a new awareness of the unstable boundaries of belonging and origin, I continue to document and make enquiries about the plants, the room, and their wider entanglements.
Orchid Room is an ongoing work in photography, field research, and archival study, made between Taiwan and Chicago. Through these images, I have tried to grapple with the questions raised by a plant that is so familiar, to unpack its multiple inheritances and histories of diaspora and the afterlives of colonial knowledge
I found myself wanting to trace the histories behind these plants. Did Chicago have its own native orchids? Were the orchids in my grandmother’s orchid room “local” to Taiwan, and how did they get there? I soon realized that what I had assumed to be markers of home had been formed by far more extensive histories of global trade, horticultural exchange, and colonial botany.
In this project, I explore this tension between the affective force of personal memory and the unfolding, larger stories we might find in plants. I am interested in how these plants have moved around the world, how they have been named, and how ideas of the “tropical” or “Asian” are constructed, circulated, and eventually naturalized. Returning to my grandmother’s orchid room, with a new awareness of the unstable boundaries of belonging and origin, I continue to document and make enquiries about the plants, the room, and their wider entanglements.
Orchid Room is an ongoing work in photography, field research, and archival study, made between Taiwan and Chicago. Through these images, I have tried to grapple with the questions raised by a plant that is so familiar, to unpack its multiple inheritances and histories of diaspora and the afterlives of colonial knowledge