Installation: How to Un(name) a Tree | Artist Talk + Panel Discussion + Walking Tour | 6 June 2025 | 15:15 | Hortus Botanicus, Leiden

SIMMR (Student Initiative for Multimodal Methods in Research) is excited to announce the second student-led event this semester, organised by MA student/researcher Xinrong Hu: the launch of artist Adong Zheng’s site-specific installation How to Un(name) a Tree, followed by an artist talk, panel discussion with curator Augustina Cai and walking tour by Xinrong Hu. Visitors are warmly invited to participate in this afternoon of shared dialogue, critical reflection, and collective (un)learning across artistic, scientific, and cultural perspectives.

Event Description: 

Artist Andong Zheng’s long-term project How to (Un) Name a Tree investigates the contested identities of three morphologically similar pine species: Pinus taiwanensis (Taiwan red pine), Pinus luchuensis (Ryukyu pine) and Pinus hwangshanensis (Huangshan pine), the last of which is native to Anhui, China, Zheng’s own place of origin. In 2024, he encountered a Huangshan pine sapling growing in the “Chinese Garden” of the Leiden Botanical Garden. As a foreign species confronted with a different institutional and cultural audience, the work takes on a new “face”. The botanical garden, as a historical symbol of scientific modernity and imperial knowledge systems, becomes both the site and subject of intervention.

Thus, as a gesture of orientation and disruption, Zheng is developing a site-specific viewing installation around the Huangshan pine sapling. Visitors are invited to reflect on the tree’s taxonomic displacement and iconographic significance and its cultural, environmental, and geographical entanglements. Within this framework, the garden becomes a stage where global scientific knowledge and localised, indigenous understandings collide. The installation challenges epistemic universalism by unsettling the neutrality of Latin taxonomy and revealing its ideological foundations. Furthermore, by inviting viewers to engage in the embodied act of seeing, it further questions whether “unlearning” dominant systems is itself sufficient, or whether it risks reproducing new hierarchies under the guise of correction.

Location:

Orangery, Hortus Botanicus. Rapenburg 73, Leiden.

Bios: 

HU Xinrong is currently an MA student in Art and Culture at Leiden University. As a writer and former editor at The Art Newspaper China, her practice focuses on questioning the narrative and representational relationship between text and visual art, as well as exploring alternative ways of engaging with art beyond institutional frameworks. Her writings have been published in ArtReview, LEAP, Ocula, and other publications.

Andong Zheng (b. 1992, Hefei, China) lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He received his MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2019 and is continuing his studies in Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Working primarily with lens-based media, Zheng seeks to open up new ways of knowing that traverse rationality. He often starts from small traces such as a shadow, a marginal detail in an archive, or an unusual flower. These elements become points of departure for unraveling broader systems. Trained in engineering, he learned to focus on micro details within rigid causal frameworks, but this very training led him to question the larger structures they sustain. His work has been exhibited at numerous international institutions and galleries, including Centre régional de la photographie Hauts-De-France (France), the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University (USA), Times Museum (China), Ames Yavuz (Singapore), and ClampArt (USA). He was shortlisted for the 9th Huayu Youth Award (2021) and the 10th Jimei x Arles Discovery Award (2024). His work has also been featured in publications such as The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice, British Journal of Photography, and Chinese Photography.

Augustina Cai is an independent curator and researcher, based in Den Haag(NL) and Wuhan(CN). She holds degrees in both Global and Comparative Philosophy and Art History from Leiden University. After pursuing a Mathematics degree at Wuhan University, she transitioned to work as an assistant curator for numerous contemporary photography and art exhibitions. She also worked at the Institute for Provocation (IFP), an alternative art space in Beijing that specialises in artist residencies and public programs for the community. She co-initiated Decolonial Being Network(DBN), aiming to reveal the coloniality of contemporary beings within everyday life, to imagine a decolonial future. Her other curatorial interests include: 1) The concept and activities of play as an alternative way of being, liberating us from the trap of rationality, arbitrariness, and enslavement; 2) alternative medical culture and its implications on different modes of perceiving and understanding human/nonhuman bodies.