How a garden becomes a dialogue(2025)

This project explores how gestures evolve into tools and how tools, in turn, generate rules through a series of planting experiments.
By translating bodily movements that emerge in gardening into verb-like tools, the project demonstrates how care and discipline coexist in the garden, and reveals how tools shape both human behaviour and plant growth.
It traces the continuous cycle between gesture, tool and rule, and proposes a new way of understanding the garden: not as pure nature, but as a language composed of choices and decisions.

该项目通过一系列种植实验，探讨手势如何演变为工具，以及工具又如何生成规则。
我将在花园种植中产生的身体动作转化为类似“动词”的工具，借此呈现照料与纪律如何在花园中同时存在，并揭示工具如何影响人的行为与植物的生长方式。
项目追溯了手势、工具与规则之间不断循环的关系，并提出一种新的花园理解方式：花园并非纯粹的自然，而是一种由选择与决策构成的语言。

Part 1.0-Publication
How a garden becomes a dialogue

This project originates from my personal experience. As a child, I grew up with a large garden, where I accumulated many intuitive and embodied experiences. As my living environment changed over time, I gradually came to realise that the meaning of the garden became more complex. I began to understand that the garden is not pure nature, but a language shaped by choices and decisions.
This contrast led me to question how gardens are actually constructed, and this personal experience became the starting point of my research.

Full article can be viewed (Here)

Part 2.0 -Tool

My methodology is grounded in practice.
Returning to the question “How can dialogue be constructed?”, I explore the possibility of communication through three modes of translation.

Through these translations, a seemingly simple act of planting gradually becomes a dialogue between body, tool, land, and container. The tools developed in this project emerge in a more natural and less predetermined manner, and their indeterminacy reflects my childhood understanding of the garden as a space of freedom.

However, as I continue to give form to these tools, I also become aware that I am inevitably producing rules. This tension leads me to the position I propose: the garden is not a self-operating nature, but a system that functions through rules.

Part 3.0 -Graden Garmmar

Garden Grammar is a design zine centred on planting practices.
Through the formulation of planting rules, it guides viewers to use gardening tools to establish a dialogue with the land.

Full article can be viewed (Here)

Part 4.0 -Back to the Exhibition

At the exhibition site, I constructed a “garden” as a space for audience participation and embodied experience.
Over the four-day exhibition, I observed that when visitors encountered this tool, they often instinctively picked it up and began piercing holes in the soil. This action required little to no explanation or instruction; it appeared to occur almost automatically.

This phenomenon confirms an observation I developed through earlier research and reading: tools possess the ability to activate embodied memory. When people encounter a digging tool, past experiences of digging and touching the soil are reawakened, and the body often responds before conscious thought.

Development

At the exhibition site, I constructed a “garden” as a space for audience participation and embodied experience.
Over the four-day exhibition, I observed that when visitors encountered this tool, they often instinctively picked it up and began piercing holes in the soil. This action required little to no explanation or instruction; it appeared to occur almost automatically.

This phenomenon confirms an observation I developed through earlier research and reading: tools possess the ability to activate embodied memory. When people encounter a digging tool, past experiences of digging and touching the soil are reawakened, and the body often responds before conscious thought.