What can eliciting the motif of the Chinese garden in a contemporary exhibition explore, in terms of a diasporic expression about cultural identification? In my exhibition All the Flowers Have Foreign Names (花都外國名) at Haiton Art Centre (24 June – 1 July 2017), I regard the “Chinese” garden as a motif through which to rethink the definition of Chineseness and what this means to my cultural identity, from the perspective of someone from the Chinese diaspora. In this paper I recount my research around the frameworks of “Chinese” gardens and installation art, through phenomenological interpretations about the landscape and cultural formation processes, in order to understand the artistic language with which I materialise this exploration. This research includes challenging stereotypes of Chinese gardens that homogenise definitions of the Chinese race and values, including the Chinese relationship to “nature”.
These ideas filter into my exhibition All the Flowers Have Foreign Names to express the diasporic experience of ‘placelessness’. Through artistic explorations around wandering, speechlessness, and a construction of cultural identity that ‘recycles in order to build itself’, I create a placeless installation that temporarily places ‘placelessness’.