A Palm Tree, A Fountain, An Umbrella is a video-poem that moves through the paradoxes of landscape and landmark, sight and site, origin and belonging, public and private memory, and past and present. The work traces circulating and shifting symbols embedded within socio-political transition, bilingual cultural identity, and coastal peripheries. Through close inspection under the microscope, I revisit colonial-era postcards, tracing their repetitions and transformations. The poem gathers, dilutes, and reconstructs these symbols like a fountain.

The work is set in the Public Garden, once the private garden of the British Commander and still locally referred to as “Bing Tou Fa Yuen.” The discrepancies between the Garden’s names across postcards reflect its layered historical transformations. As the first garden opened to the public in Hong Kong, it was also established as a Botanical Garden: a key British scientific site for mapping, collecting, and exchanging plant species from China and Southeast Asia within a wider imperial network connected to Kew Gardens in London. Through fragmented, speculative, and parallel narration, the work seeks to redress the entangled power dynamics behind these picturesque landscapes, architectures, and human histories.

Before the fountain stood at the center of the Garden, there was once a palm tree. Over the decades, the fountain was demolished and rebuilt three times, while its image remained an iconic yet shape-shifting water feature. The Garden has witnessed Hong Kong’s transformations, yet its histories often remain elusive, suspended within spaces of disappearance.
 

Across the postcards I found in the grey market, the shadow of a girl seems to hover. Later, after relocating to New York, I felt I encountered her again—this time she is labelled “Canton Girl,” shown in side profile while holding an umbrella in a foreign museum collection. In earlier portrait conventions, a sitter holding an umbrella could suggest departure: the beginning of a long journey, with the umbrella as an essential companion for sun or rain. The image also speaks to the concealed histories of “Mui Tsai,” systems of servitude that circulated between Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The video-poem takes the form of a postcard written to this Canton Girl, like a murmur.