Artist Talk + Panel Discussion + Walking Tour
SIMMR Presents: How to Un(name) a Tree
- Date
- Friday 6 June 2025
- Time
- Address
- Orangery, Hortus Botanicus
Rapenburg 73
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.
Ultimately, the work opens a space to reimagine the symbolic and political force of the tree, not simply as a biological entity, but as a site of human intervention, historical narrative, and relational entanglement between people and nature. His research treats botanical naming not merely as a question of taxonomy and nomenclature as such, but as a metaphorical and mediated space for further reflection on topics such as colonialism, epistemology, post-positivist critique, and geopolitical ideologies to emerge.
More information can be found here.
