Revolutionary Planting Calendar, 2025. Mixed media painting, relief prints, and rice paper collage on cotton and mulberry paper cyanotypes. 132” x 132”. Installed at the National Asian Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju, South Korea. Photography by Kim Young-tae.
Jointly commissioned by M+ Hong Kong and the National Asian Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju for the ACC’s 10th anniversary show, Manifesto of Spring, Revolutionary Planting Calendar is a large-scale (11’ x 11’) drawing that depicts several dozen different plants, animals and fungi that have symbolized — and have been literally instrumental to — liberation and anti-Fascist struggles around the world.
In reference to my own gardening practice and the ubiquity of seasonal planting calendars in my home of northern California, Revolutionary Planting Calendar borrows the form of a circular seasonal planting calendar to map a more-than-human sense of time and pays homage to the plant, animal and fungal forces that have historically resisted colonial control. Inspired by both Chinese acupuncture diagrams and Hilma af Klint’s Tree of Knowledge series, this “calendar” brings together popular revolutionary icons from around the world — such as black panthers, watermelons, and the snails of the Zapatistas — with less well-known symbols of decolonial liberation, such as amaranth, which was banned by the Catholic Church in Central and South America and remains a powerful symbol of Indigenous food sovereignty. The cyanotype base was created during a rainstorm, during which the paper blew away into a marsh; the splatters of the rain and the gusts of the wind are captured in the texture and odd angular folds registered in the cyanotype print.
From the exhibition statement about this work, written by the M+ curatorial team: “Its labyrinthine visual language echoes the intricate pathways formed by these species, challenging the dogmatic logic of ‘functional’ cartography that has long been utilised for colonial navigation and control. The work foregrounds the often-neglected agency of nonhuman life, and the entanglements that shape our histories, landscapes, and our own bodies.”