PLANTS, KNOWLEDGE, AND CONTEMPORARY ARTS IN eAST AND sOUTHEAST aSIA (2026-2028)

Drawing on East and Southeast Asian perspectives in ecocritical art history, critical plant studies, and environmental histories, this research problematizes the predominantly Euro-American framing of the recent ‘botanical turn’ in contemporary art studies. With an intermedium approach that examines both tangible and intangible artworks and taking plant-based artistic practices as an environmental lens, this study situates close analyses of selected art works and projects within broader environmental histories and ecological contexts. By foregrounding the diverse relations between arts and plants, I conceptualize plants simultaneously as material, medium, method and active agent in contemporary arts. Through a theoretical framework of botanical proximities, this research identifies the practices, strategies, and collaborations employed to redefine the coexistence of arts, botany and humans. As artists reconfigure eco-social patterns intertwined with plants and their associated forms of (counter)knowledge, these practices raise profound ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, ethical, and religious questions on the role of plant-bound art. In doing so they offer new insights into ecological, cultural, communal, and planetary (un)sustainabilities.

This three-year research project is generously funded by Kone Foundation.

NEWS

11 Dec 2025 Kone Foundation, Awarded grants and residencies, Plants, Knowledge, and Contemporary Arts in East and Southeast Asia

27 Dec 2025 NSEANET Northeast and Southeast Asian Studies Network, University of Helsinki: Minna Valjakka Won Kone Foundation Grant: Plants, Knowledge, and Contemporary Arts in East and Southeast Asia

EVENTS, TALKs and publications

Feb 2025   Botanical Remediations: Farming, plants and contemporary arts in Hong Kong. Visual Culture in Modern and Contemporary China Seminar series, University of Oxford

Jan 2025 Botanical Remediations: Plants, knowledge, and contemporary arts in Southeast Asia. NUS History Department Speaker Series, National University of Singapore

July 2024   Aspirations of Awareness: Plants, Wisdom, and Contemporary Arts in Southeast Asia. In AAS-in-Asia, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta

Apr 2024   Botanical mediations of Agro-Extractivism: (Counter-)Aesthetics of Violence in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art. In The Aesthetics of Geopower: Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies, University of Amsterdam