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With Love. From an Invader. – Yan Wang Preston
With Love. From an Invader. celebrates the life and resilience of the rhododendron. The book creates space to contemplate the intimacy, beauty, and strength of nature, and the eternity of time within an ecological and political framework.
Artist : Yan Wang Preston
Series : With Love. From an Invader.
Book published by The Eriskay Connection
It is a love letter from a non-native species to the cosmopolitan ecology of contemporary Britain. It is also a love letter to the British land from its non-native inhabitants who make it a home for its multicultural residents, both human and non-human.
With Love. From an Invader. – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me is an intensive field study. Every other day for a year, Yan Wang Preston (CN/GB) went to a particular love-heart-shaped Rhododendron ponticum bush and photographed it. She also collected another smaller rhododendron shrub’s autumn leaves, seed capsules, aborted flower buds and fading flowers before making a series of artwork with them. In this process she discovered a thriving ecology with the non-native rhododendrons as the keystone species. She also gained an embodied understanding of her rooted position as a migrant in the UK.
British rhododendrons are all introduced plants, brought from southern Europe and East Asia for science and horticulture. Although still common and a much-loved sight in most British gardens, one hybrid species, the ponticum variety, is frequently labelled as non-native invasive in conservation management, targeted to be removed with often violent means. This unquestioned hatred of the non-native rang alarm for Wang Preston. Like millions of others, she is a migrant in the United Kingdom. The contested perceptions of rhododendrons suggest that politics is at play within the apparent objectivity of science and the definition and ownership of the British landscape. What is a ‘national’ British landscape and its associated ‘national ecology’? Who defines it? And in whose favour? Wang Preston sought to understand both rhododendrons and her own position in this land, because rhododendrons are certainly not invasive. Rather, they are a keystone species that plays a central role in the local ecology, which is already largely non-native.
The book is published in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The essays in the book underscore the interdisciplinary approach, bridging art, ecology, post-colonial studies, and cultural memory. Together, they encourage readers to explore how plant
life reflects histories of exchange, resistance, and survival, enriching the relevance of Yan Wang Preston’s work in contemporary environmental conversations.
Yan Wang Preston is a Chinese British visual artist interested in landscape representation, identity, migration, and the environment. Her other projects include Mother River (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2018), Forest (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2018) and Three Easier Pieces (2021-ongoing).
© Yan Wang Preston – All rights reserved
