How to (Un)Name a Tree

Andong Zheng’s long-term project "How to (Un)Name a Tree” (2022 - ongoing, China/Taiwan/Japan/the Netherlands) investigates the relationship between naming, seeing, and knowledge formation through three closely related and morphologically similar pine species in East Asia: Pinus luchuensis, Pinus taiwanensis, and Pinus hwangshanensis.

During the era of international competition in species discovery, these three pines were successively named by an German botanist upon his return from an expedition to Imperial Japan, a Japanese botanist stationed in colonial Taiwan, and a Chinese botanist of the Republican period. Decades later, their classifications became a subject of dispute during the Cold War, as botanists debated whether they should be regarded as regional variants of a single species or remain distinct.

The act of naming presumes difference. The act of photographing presumes evidence. Yet when confronted with highly similar morphs, both systems of order begin to falter within their own logic. Working under fog and nightfall, using artificial light and often tightly framed compositions, he isolates these trees from their identifiable backdrop, and later re-configures them through collage and masking, to push the promise of the index to its threshold.

These images of pine trees echo one another, triggering the sensation of “it might be,” without ever arriving at the certainty of “it is.” In this unresolved zone between language and vision, they instead draw our attention to the man-made notion of boundaries we inherit: between species, nations, and selves.