Graft

2025

Engraving on aluminum

87 x 47 inches, a set of two 

 

This body of work, presented in the solo exhibition, is held between two pink flowers—recurring emblems that refuse to settle, flora entangled with war and desire in both fiction and lived reality. Nature is not neutral but instrumentalized: plants flattened into herbarium records, named through colonial vocabularies, and made to thrive in foreign gardens.
 

The Hong Kong orchid tree, Bauhinia × Blakeana, circulates on Hong Kong’s coin currency, replacing the Queen’s head. The flower saturates civic space as street trees, statues, and flags—a bloom made official. This substitution marks the beginning of the postcolonial era, yet it also reveals how symbols attempt to smooth over what remains unresolved.
 

What happens if I unsee it as an emblem and relearn it as a flower? I observe how this sterile hybrid nevertheless thrives across winters and continents, carried through cutting, grafting, and care. It exists through touch and maintenance—like a community, like an inheritance sustained through attachment rather than origin.