Graft Garden

作品賞析

The artist Pan Yi-Kai is quite fascinated by cyberpunk fiction, which often describes things like “a world in which technology controls people and their bodies” and “assembling human limbs into machines to evolve into higher life forms.” In his Graft Garden, he depicts plant species from different places put into a climate-controlled box. The roots, stems, and leaves of different species are grafted together as if they were mechanical parts, creating a cross-species hybrid life form. Pan uses paper gravure techniques to enable flexible splicing together of the various parts, and to create delicate layers of lines and colors. In the background, the blue greenhouse image is based on the shape of the Royal Botanical Gardens in the United Kingdom; the box, meanwhile, looks carefully designed. This composition tells the story of how human beings store the world’s various rare species in carefully designed artificial systems like greenhouses and herbaria, then manipulate the living environments of the new species as if they were creator-gods.