My research this year at the Huntington was profiled, along with fellow Long-Term Fellows Scott Doebler, Sandy Rodriguez, Catherine Ceniza Choy, and more.
‘… Wendy Cheng’s research on plant migration—how living collections embody layered histories of beauty, displacement, and care. By late morning Cheng, the Simon and June Li Fellow, lifts a folder from the archive and studies a page covered in looping script. The handwriting wavers, part record-keeping, part devotion. A professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, she is writing a book of essays on plant migration and human–plant relations—an inquiry into how “our everyday experiences and perspectives shift if we pay more attention to plant life, and see plants as living histories—Indigenous, immigrant, local—that have been heavily shaped by humans but also have their own stories to tell.”
‘Working across archives, living collections, and gardens, Cheng traces how beauty and plunder travel together. “Like humans, plants have been displaced and exploited, their ecosystems compromised, destroyed, or transformed by capitalist and colonial systems,” she says. “Beauty is complicated—it can be possessive and exploitative, too—but at its core, my focus on beauty is about the kind of life-affirming joy that interacting with and learning from plants provides for so many people, even in the worst of circumstances.”
‘Her project focuses in part on camellias—plants that “embody hundreds of years of history between East Asia and the West.” They traveled the same imperial routes as tea, she notes, but “the stories of each set of human hands that cared for them, shaped them, loved them, have come to have their own lives and logics.” Los Angeles, she adds, is “an important place in global camellia history.”’
Read the full article here
Wendy Cheng 