A garden is a place where people act upon nature. Yet the plants growing there do not simply obey us. In contemporary art practices involving organisms, plants, microorganisms, and ecosystems, a garden might be more than a subject for a work. It might also offer a way to reconsider a world in which the artificial and the natural are intertwined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One point of reference is the garden that British filmmaker Derek Jarman created at Prospect Cottage, on a bleak stretch of coast facing the Strait of Dover. What interests me here is more than the cultivation of a beautiful garden for decorative pleasure. It is the question of how we form relationships with plants: beings that share our world but live according to different rhythms and conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A human lifetime occupies only a fraction of the Earth\u2019s long history. By looking beyond plants as things to decorate with or manage, and attending instead to the conditions in which they grow, we may begin to see the world from a position slightly less centered on ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A garden depends on the particular conditions that allow plants to grow. Rooted in the ground, they enter into relationships with local light, water, and soil. Some wither despite our care; others, suited to the conditions of a place, continue growing regardless of our intentions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Every vacant patch of land has its own history and plants already growing there. These are not necessarily native species. Plants classified as non-native can also become familiar, even cherished, presences in everyday life. How to understand that familiarity alongside their ecological effects remains a separate question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps a garden begins less with a design imposed from scratch than with a relationship to an environment already there. Before pulling everything out because it is a weed, we might look at what is growing and the relationships it sustains. Such an attitude also opens questions about the conditions under which beings with different histories can coexist. Still, the distinction between native and non-native plants cannot simply be transferred to human migration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where, then, might we establish a garden in which such relationships can develop? Could the white cube become an artificial garden that allows us to renew our relationship with an environment? Conversely, what changes when we call a patch of already vegetated wasteland a \u201cgarden\u201d and make it a site of art?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In In Minor Keys, conceived by curator Koyo Kouoh for the 2026 Venice Biennale, the Creole garden and the courtyard are understood as spaces of self-sufficiency born under conditions of constraint. They are both actual and metaphorical places for rest, reconnection, and engagement with life beyond the human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Venice Biennale official website | In Minor Keys<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Holy See Pavilion\u2019s The Ear Is the Eye of the Soul also introduces an instrument in Venice\u2019s Giardino Mistico that translates plant bioelectric activity into sound. What interests me is that plants are more than objects to be contemplated: their activity helps constitute the sound of the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Venice Biennale official website | Holy See Pavilion: The Ear Is the Eye of the Soul<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n With these gardens in mind, I want to turn to the art of Tainan, where I have been living since June this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Planting trees and flowers in gardens, parks, and streets brings nature and human intervention together. Do we call an existing gathering of plants a garden, or do we create one by selecting and arranging them? Considering the difference reveals histories of human intervention within what we tend to call natural scenery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Shiiba, a village in Japan\u2019s Miyazaki Prefecture, for example, the history of slash-and-burn cultivation overlaps with cedar plantations established through postwar afforestation. A forest so dense that little sunlight enters, even during the day, can also be read as a landscape shaped by policy and land use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I heard about Shiiba from a friend who researches anthropology. He told me that a villager\u2019s diary that he found during his research described the dark cedar woods as a \u201cforest of death.\u201d The phrase reverses familiar images: a dense forest signifies death, while the fire of slash-and-burn cultivation signifies regeneration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Taiwan, too, land use and landscapes have changed under colonial rule and successive political regimes. We cannot understand the scenery before us independently of its history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within the name \u201cbeautiful island,\u201d how much do we see of the histories of its individual places?<\/p>\n\n\n\n These questions bring me to That Field in Balin (\u62d4\u6797\u90a3\u584a\u7530), a work by Xu Yici (\u8a31\u6021\u6148)<\/a> and Haocao Dui (\u597d\u8349\u968a) presented at the 2026 Mattauw Earth Art Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I moved from Kyoto to Tainan in June. While staying at Absence Space (\u4e0d\u5b58\u5728\u5287\u5834), I first heard about Balin (\u62d4\u6797) from a friend who often visited. It is roughly thirty minutes by train from Tainan Station. With my Chinese still faltering, I followed that friend to the artist\u2019s studio for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They were making vessels from earth and seeds. I did not really know what they were for, but they needed a hand, so I helped. The artist was busy preparing for the festival. Before I even understood what kind of festival it was, I had begun going to the field almost every week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n My main job was cutting weeds. Without quite noticing, I had joined Haocao Dui (\u597d\u8349\u968a). After all, there was always good food waiting when the work was done. There was some truth to the idea that I was helping just to get a meal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That Field in Balin begins with a former asparagus field in the village and seeks to cultivate anew the relationship between people and land. Wild plants are left in place; green-manure plants and seeds preserved locally are planted. Together, these practices nurture an environment in which crops, native plants, insects and animals can coexist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition brings together video documenting everyday farm work, an installation made with crops brought from the field, and a booklet of household recipes and food memories assembled through interviews with residents. Working the soil, growing, cooking, eating: through this sequence, labor and daily life rooted in the land emerge alongside memories passed on at the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking at the exhibition, I began to understand my own hours cutting weeds and then sharing a meal differently. They, too, had been part of cultivating relationships between this place and its people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That field in Balin is an old asparagus field beside the Zengwen River, once cultivated by Grandma Laizhi (\u4f86\u679d) of the Balin community. It is also the starting point for my imagining of healing between people and land. We leave wild plants in place, plant abundant green manure, and introduce some of the seeds and plants preserved by local residents. We allow crops, native plants, insects, and animals to coexist freely, waiting for the land to slowly awaken. An old asparagus field beside the Zengwen River. The artist told me that she had moved to Balin a few years earlier and established her studio there. She also said that she had worked with photography as a student. Something of that experience seems to carry through into the interview booklet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If photography records what is before us while inviting us to imagine the time and memories behind it, food plays that role here. Asking about a single dish gradually brings farm work, family, the table, the seasons, and time spent on this land into view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From outside Taiwan, names such as braised pork rice, beef noodle soup, and soup dumplings readily come to mind. But an island\u2019s food culture cannot be contained in a handful of representative dishes. Even those who live there do not know every meal cooked and eaten on its soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I once researched breadfruit for a work I was making. When I asked a Taiwanese friend about it, they replied, \u201cI\u2019ve seen it, but I don\u2019t know where to buy it.\u201d Seen, but never eaten. That distance stayed with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Food memories cannot be fully grasped at the scale of a nation or region. They branch into finer histories: those of households, generations, villages, and individual lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One such dish may be \u9e79\u74dc\u9183\u8671\u76ee\u9b5a\u982d, a milkfish-head dish prepared with salted melon, included in the booklet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was little, my father and mother were always busy. Whenever she had time, my mother would prepare milkfish heads with salted melon for us to eat. We still eat this dish at home today. It is my favorite, and the dish from my childhood that I remember most fondly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Hu Fuhan (\u80e1\u670d\u6f22), \u201c\u9e79\u74dc\u9183\u8671\u76ee\u9b5a\u982d.\u201d English translation based on the Chinese transcription supplied by the author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This account concerns more than flavor. Behind the words \u201cmy father and mother were always busy\u201d lie the work and family life of that time. A dish made in the gaps between obligations later becomes remembered as \u201cmother\u2019s cooking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This need not be a memory of regional cuisine shared by everyone. Someone else living in Tainan might never have heard of the dish. The booklet therefore reads as both a recipe collection and a small archive that gathers the memories of a place through food. Asking about cooking gives words to domestic time that would rarely otherwise enter a historical record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its approach echoes that of the field. Rather than preparing the land solely to harvest one crop efficiently, That Field in Balin leaves wild plants, grows green manure, and seeks to create an environment shared by many forms of life. The booklet likewise places different households\u2019 tastes and memories alongside one another, without resolving them into a single story of \u201cTaiwanese food.\u201d Perhaps that story should begin with individual memories, rather than the other way round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet time spent in the field does not necessarily reach an exhibition\u2019s visitors intact. For me, the experience of the table connects the labor in the video with the food in the booklet. How does that continuity reach someone who has never been to the field? How far can video, crops, and a booklet share the time of everyday life? This remains an open question when considering the exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thinking further about the agricultural landscape of this region leads to the history of the Chianan Irrigation System (\u5609\u5357\u5927\u5733), built during Japanese rule. Work began in the 1920s and was completed in 1930, with Japanese engineer Hatta Yoichi (\u516b\u7530\u8207\u4e00) leading its design and construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Modern irrigation is a technology for moving water, but also for reorganizing production and the rhythms of the land. This is not something the work directly states; it is a reading I bring to it from the history of this place. Leaving wild plants, refusing to rush the harvest, and waiting for the land to \u201cslowly awaken\u201d seem to place another kind of time upon a landscape organized for production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps a garden is a place where the activities of different eras continue to accumulate. That Field in Balin can be read as a practice of working within those layers, cultivating the relationships that come next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From shortly after my arrival in Taiwan until the festival began in September, I visited the field almost every week. Whenever we finished working, the artist would cook in an earthenware pot, and we would gather around the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My Chinese is not very good, after all. Sometimes I brought along a friend who spoke English. A slightly different group of faces gathered around the same table each time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n My reasons for going to Balin were surprisingly simple. I wanted to move my body. I wanted more chances to speak Chinese. Above all, the food was good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back, though, I think there was more to it. Cutting weeds, touching soil, gathering around a pot once the work was done. Time moved there a little differently from time in the city. Getting to know someone, learning about the land, producing a result \u2014 none of it had to be hurried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps what I was allowed to enjoy in that field was a slightly extravagant kind of grown-up play in the dirt: a small way of resisting a society that keeps accelerating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back, the time I spent in Balin returns, by another route, to the question of the garden raised at the beginning: to the places that slip out of human management in Gilles Cl\u00e9ment\u2019s Manifesto of the Third Landscape; to the garden Jarman grew on barren ground; and to the Creole gardens discussed at the Venice Biennale, which sustain everyday life under conditions of constraint. Their histories differ, but they resonate with That Field in Balin in the way they step back a little from arranging a place according to human wishes, seeking instead a relationship with the life already there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this field, seeds offer a way to trace the provenance of the land, and through it, people\u2019s memories. These seeds are perhaps a little different from antiques at a flea market. We still eat what grows from them. They do more than carry something of past lives: through planting, growing, and eating, relationships are perhaps still being formed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A garden is a place where people act upon nature. Yet the plants growing there do not simply obey us. In contemporary art practices involving organisms, plants, microorganisms, and ecosystems, a garden might be more than a subject for a work. 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Beyond expression as an artist, I explore ways of practising and the spaces between them, working primarily in contemporary photography, supporting project planning and operations, writing, and interpretation and translation. I graduated from the Art Environment programme at Kyoto University of the Arts Graduate School in 2026. I am currently based in Tainan, Taiwan, where I make work and conduct research.\r\n\r\nInstagram<\/a>"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3220"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3245,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3220\/revisions\/3245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3220"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=3220"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=3220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Prospect](\"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Prospect_Cottage-_Derek_Jarmans_home_Dungeness-1685x1280.jpg\")
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWho Planted the Landscape?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nA Landscape in No Hurry to Yield: Cultivating Relationships in That Field in Balin<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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\n
I have always imagined people placing both feet in the soil, sensing the breath of the heart among the grasses and trees. The \u201cearth\u2019s table\u201d is not simply built upon the land: it grows out of the soil as a place to share food. This field is in no hurry for a plentiful harvest. In the flow of the river, the seasons and time, gathering, planting, harvesting, and tasting can once again become a slow and tangible landscape of everyday life \u2014 a place where we nourish one another.
\u2014 From the exhibition text for That Field in Balin. English translation based on the Chinese transcription supplied by the author.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/onlylove.art\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/000087760012-1920x1273.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhat Is \u201cTaiwanese Food\u201d? Memories That Resist a Single Name<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nLetting Another Breeze Through Layers of Time<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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