This summer, the Queens Botanical Garden bloomed into more than a garden — it became a living gallery.
BY SERENA HANZHI WANG Aug 19, 2025
Taiwan: A World of Orchids 2025 opened its doors in full bloom, filling the greenhouse with thousands of rare orchids that blurred the line between horticultural spectacle and contemporary art. Co-presented by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, the exhibition honored Taiwan’s legacy as the “Island of Orchids” while sparking a global conversation through petals, roots, and ideas.
“Taiwan is the world’s largest exporter of orchids. They’re not just an economic lifeline — they’re a cultural symbol. To share their beauty and spirit here in Queens, with this community, feels extraordinary,” said U.S. Congresswoman Grace Meng at the opening.
One of the show’s highlights was its six artist commissions — works that drew directly from orchids as muse. Each piece didn’t just mirror the plant’s natural form but transformed it into a symbol of language, body, and thought, creating bridges between East and West, tradition and the future.
“As ambassadors of resilience and inclusivity, orchids bloom together in diversity. Each flower holds its own beauty, yet none erase the other. That’s the story of our city too,” noted Queens Botanical Garden ambassador Baileen Huang. “Different cultures, different backgrounds, learning to live in difference, finding harmony in coexistence. This exhibition isn’t just about nature’s power — it’s a mirror of the spirit our community aspires to.”
The result was more than a flower show. It was a multi-sensory art journey where delicate petals met avant-garde imagination, and viewers left not only dazzled in sight but also stirred in soul.
Ziggy Yang Blossom: Orchid (2025) Interactive video installation Image courtesy of the artist
Ziggy Yang – “Blossom: Orchid”
At the heart of the exhibition, New York-based Chinese artist Ziggy (Zhenglong) Yang presented Blossom: Orchid, an interactive video installation that quite literally bloomed to life in the viewer’s presence.
I found Yang Zhenglong’s orchid in a shadowed corner, glowing like a secret. On an old CRT screen, a bud hovered, waiting. At first it seemed indifferent, but as I leaned closer it began to open, almost shyly. Petal by petal, it unfurled in time-lapse, a bloom triggered not by the sun but by my presence. When I stepped back, it collapsed into a bud again—reset, ready for another stranger.
The cycle repeated endlessly, but it never felt mechanical. Each time I watched, it was different, because I was different: nearer, slower, more distracted, or more intent. In this way the piece was less about orchids than about attention itself. To notice something—truly notice—is already an act of care.
Yang first studied mechanical engineering in Xi’an before coming to New York for Tisch’s ITP program, where he turned circuits and code into tools for something closer to ritual. His broader practice often borrows from religious iconography to artificial intelligence, weaving them into installations that ask how technology can carry human feeling. Here, the orchid is both digital and devotional: a flower that blooms only for the viewer who chooses to come near.
He calls the work Blossom: Orchid. For me, it was less a title than a question: what does it mean for beauty to be fleeting, yet always repeatable? Each bloom is impermanent, collapsing as quickly as it appeared. And yet it always returns, like memory, like ritual, like the strange resilience of desire.
“No fixed meaning,” Yang has said of his work, “but a space where viewers bring their own emotions and thoughts.” Standing there, I felt that space open. The orchid bloomed on-screen, and something in me bloomed too, quietly. Perhaps that is why the piece was recognized this year with a Bronze A’ Design Award—not for spectacle, but for reminding us that presence itself can be sacred.
Fengzee Yang Breathe (2025) Wood sculpture (14 inches tall) Image courtesy of the artist
Fengzee Yang – “Breathe”
In the middle of the orchid greenhouse, I found a small wooden sculpture resting on a pedestal. At first glance, it looked like a seed, or perhaps a bud paused just before breaking open. Fourteen inches tall, carved from a single piece of wood, it seemed to glow under the soft light: smooth, warm, alive. I couldn’t decide if it belonged to the world of plants or to the world of bodies.
Leaning closer, I saw grain lines rippling across its surface like veins, or the musculature of something curled inside itself. It was titled Breathe, and suddenly the piece did feel like breath—held, suspended. As though nature had exhaled once and then stopped, inviting me to pause too.
There was tension in its stillness. Orchids are epiphytes, Yang reminded us—plants that cling to trees, surviving on air, water, whatever they can find. They live suspended, unrooted, yet they persist. This sculpture seemed to hold that same fragile defiance: a body that survives on what cannot be held. A tenderness that is also a kind of strength.
Fengzee Yang knows this feeling intimately. Born in China and uprooted to the U.S. as a teenager, she describes her early years as “constantly encountering strangeness.” Art became her way to speak a language of dislocation and belonging. She later studied sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her practice now reshapes wood and clay into hybrid bodies—part plant, part human, always in-between.
In Breathe, I felt that biography made material. The form hovered between bulb and torso, seed and organ, orchid and fetus. Its ambiguity was not confusion but clarity: life in flux. Yang has carried this exploration across residencies from Jingdezhen to Vermont, always searching for how memory and body intermingle with the natural world. Here, in this modest wooden bud, she distilled it all into one gesture: an inhale that never quite becomes an exhale.
I stood there longer than I expected, caught by the quiet insistence of the piece. Around me, orchids were blooming extravagantly, but this sculpture asked for something rarer—to stop, to hold still, to notice the beauty in the pause.
Celine Lam Passenger (2025) Mixed-media painting (ink, rice-paper collage, acrylic & oil on canvas, approx. 6 ft²) Image courtesy of Serena Hanzhi Wang
Celine Lam – “Passenger”
On the right side of the greenhouse area, color erupted like static. A six-foot square painting leaned into me before I could lean into it. Celine Lam called it Passenger, but it felt less like a painting than a storm, collaged together out of ink, calligraphy paper, acrylic, oil.
The surface was restless. Grids and jagged lines shot across translucent layers of rice paper, paper meant for practice, for mistakes. Black ink bled into the fibers like smoke, while here and there bolts of red or electric blue sliced through with brutal clarity. I kept oscillating between two readings: mist and scaffolding, storm cloud and data chart. It was both landscape and diagram, chaos and order.
Standing in front of it, I thought about the way our generation is always in transit, pushed forward by technologies and economies that rarely stop to ask what they take from us. Lam calls us passengers in this rush, hurtling forward yet often numb. And yes, staring at her work I felt both the turbulence and the exhaustion. But also the possibility of calm—patches of pale paper opening like clearings, places to breathe inside the storm.
Her choice of calligraphy practice paper was sharp: fragile, absorbent, a humble material tied to cultural heritage. It stood its ground against the violent acrylic marks. That tension—softness and severity—felt like the tension of our lives: empathy persisting inside speed, memory embedded within acceleration.
Lam herself knows about polarities. Born in Hong Kong, raised between Asia and the U.S., trained first at RISD and now at Hunter College, she moves between cultures as easily as between materials. She talks about finding beauty in the endless possibilities between pairs—chaos and order, nature and technology, East and West. In Passenger, she translates that philosophy into a visual journey.
I walked away from the canvas thinking less about abstraction than about survival. How do we find ourselves when everything around us insists we move faster? Lam’s painting doesn’t answer—it lingers, unsettled, like a window to see the current human condition. A reminder that even in transit, even as passengers, we can choose to look inward.
Global Perspectives in Bloom
While Ziggy, Fengzee, and Celine works were focal points, the orchid exhibition at Queens Botanical Garden was truly a chorus of international voices.
I stopped first at Shademomo Iwasaki’s Refined Beauty. A sculptural bouquet made of textiles and mixed media, its petals were cut from traditional Taiwanese patterns, then layered with echoes from her Japanese and Ghanaian heritage. The bouquet was vibrant yet fragile, a monument stitched together out of multiplicity. Standing in front of it, I thought about how many identities can live inside one flower—Taiwanese, diasporic, personal. Beauty here was not singular but contradictory, and that contradiction was its strength.
A few steps away, Mei-Ju Shen’s Orchid: A Prelude hovered like a phantom gown. At first it looked like couture: sustainable felted wool, fine embroidery, the silhouette of a flowing white dress. But the closer I leaned, the more it read like armor disguised as softness. Orchid motifs spread across the bodice, while ombre purples and greens bled through the fabric like blossoms staining the surface. It felt ceremonial, but also like a shield. Shen described it as a prelude—an opening gesture—and I could see why: it honored the resilience of Taiwanese women across generations, whose strength often wears the guise of tenderness.
And then, playfully, I came across Rio Jiunyun Chen’s Peace in Motion. An installation sculpture piece made of two badminton rackets dangled from the eaves, a curve of birdies suspended midair—each one carefully hand-worked into the shape of an orchid bloom. What should have been a fleeting moment of sport had become a floating bouquet. The piece spoke to Taiwan’s recent achievements in global athletics, but also to its cultural identity: peace not as the absence of motion, but as harmony within it. A rally mid-swing, a gesture mid-air, stilled into something lasting.
In the end, the 2025 orchid-themed art exhibition at Queens Botanical Garden was more than an art show or a flower display; it was a celebration of life’s resilience and beauty in many forms. For art enthusiasts and casual visitors alike, it offered an eloquent reminder that nature and art have always been intertwined. I saw that truth made tangible in the way children ran toward Ziggy Yang’s glowing CRT, giggling as the digital bud bloomed in response to their presence. Just as an orchid’s allure lies in its fragile blooms and tenacious survival, the art inspired by it combined aesthetic delicacy with profound insight. The exhibit succeeded in crafting a space of eloquent reflection, where one could simultaneously admire a rare orchid species and ponder an artist’s interpretation of time, identity, or harmony. In a city as diverse and fast-paced as New York, this oasis of orchids and art encouraged people to slow down. Each artwork was a conversation with the viewer – intimate, insightful, and evocative – and each orchid a silent muse. As the exhibition closed, its impact lingered like the faint perfume of petals: a gentle call to notice the transient wonders around us, and to recognize the shared humanity that, like the orchid, blooms quietly even in a turbulent world.
Shademomo Iwasaki Refined Beauty (2025) Textile and mixed-media sculptural bouquet Image courtesy of Serena Hanzhi Wang 
Mei-Ju Shen Orchid: A Prelude (2025) Garment (sustainable felted wool, embroidery, contemporary couture techniques) Image courtesy of Serena Hanzhi Wang
Rio Jiunyun Chen Peace in Motion (2025) Site-specific installation (hand-crafted birdies transformed into orchid-like forms, suspended with badminton rackets) Image courtesy of the artist
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