For many years, through photography, drawing, and collage, I have been reflecting on the question of what it means to make something as a human being, or what constitutes something “made by humans.”
With The Garden, I turn this question toward what is both most familiar to us and, at the same time, most elusive: nature.
For me, a garden is not nature itself. A gardener cannot invent trees or plants. What the gardener does is to select, move, arrange, combine, and create relationships between them. A gardener is therefore not someone who creates nature, but someone who constructs the way nature appears.
In The Garden, I begin by constructing a space that does not exist in reality from architectural elements. Columns, walls, windows, stairways, ornaments, and other forms made by human beings are assembled with great density to create an imaginary architectural world. Within and across this space, I then introduce hundreds of images collected from forests and jungles around the world: plants, light, water, and sometimes animals or even tiny insects.
I bring together, within a single space, different places, different times, and different forms of nature. I do not simply photograph nature; I cut out the nature already present in photographs, transplant it, move it, arrange it, and reconstruct the relationships between its elements.
But I am not creating nature itself.
I am working with a nature that has already become an image.
A forest cut out from a photograph becomes, from that moment, an “image of nature” as we are able to see it. I cut into that image again, move it, change its scale, and place it in relation to other images. In this way, a garden comes into being that exists nowhere in the real world.
Is this garden a false nature?
I would rather leave that question open.
We normally look at the trees and forests before us and call them “nature.” But does the world really exist in the form in which we see it? Or does it appear this way because we can perceive it only through our body, our memory, our experience, and our culture?
I do not question the existence of a world beyond ourselves. Rather, I am interested in this contradiction: the world possesses a thickness and a resistance that exceed our perception, and yet we can experience it only through our own bodies and our own ways of perceiving.
In The Garden, I try to make this contradiction visible by blurring the boundary between the natural and the artificial. Architecture is made by human beings; yet when plants, light, water, and living creatures enter it, cover it, and grow through it, the architecture gradually begins to appear like a living organism. Conversely, plants, water, and animals, when placed within this artificially constructed space, cease to appear simply as nature: they become a landscape.
Nature and artifice are not, for me, two opposing worlds.
They enter into one another and together shape what we call “the world.”
And standing before this garden, the viewer becomes, without even realizing it, a kind of gardener.
What is near, and what is far? Where does the plant end and the architecture begin? What do we call natural, and what do we call artificial? Through their own perception, viewers in turn reconstruct a world within the image.
I do not consider The Garden a form of photography intended to record the beauty of nature.
It is an attempt to question how human beings look at nature, and how the world we call “nature” comes into appearance before us.
When we think about protecting nature, we often tend to separate human beings from nature. For me, what matters is instead to look again at this boundary.
We are not outside nature.
We look at it, name it, cut it apart, create gardens, and then look at those gardens again as nature.
We ourselves are caught within this movement.
The Garden is an attempt to make this movement visible in the form of a landscape.