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Arborescence
(2024)
Arborescence is a series of oil paintings depicting human figures and tree-like abstractions enmeshed in colorful entanglements. This body of work serves as a meditation on our broken relationship with the Earth – one that relegates “nature” to a realm outside of and apart from the human, an inert object devoid of agency, a resource to be controlled, commodified, and exploited. Trees and animals and rocks and rivers are rendered mere matter, rather than beings in their own right.
Through painting, I seek to visually affirm a fundamental oneness: we are the Earth, not separate from it. In my compositions, the intertwined human and arboreal bodies collapse binaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, self and other, individual and collective. The work of restoring kinship with the more-than-human world is the work of widening our circles of compassion – beyond self, beyond family, beyond nation – to encompass the entire planet. Grounded in an expansive reciprocity, interdependence, and care, Arborescence seeks to make space for both grief and hope in the face of ecological crisis.
I created this project during my fellowship at the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) in 2024. My ideas were profoundly shaped by the brilliant work of scholars and thinkers including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Amitav Ghosh, Richard Powers, David Pellow, Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Wynter, Kohei Saito, Jenny Odell, adrienne maree brown, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Juno Salazar Parreñas, and many others.
The dichotomy between "society" and "nature" rests upon a long tradition of Western thought. Plato conceptualized a world of Forms, an ideal realm of abstract truth and essential reality, entirely removed from the quotidian domain of the tangible. Descartes then introduced a dualism that posited human minds as agential and animated by spirit, while relegating everything else – namely, our fleshy bodies and the rest of the natural world – to mere inert, mechanistic matter. Early Christian theology extolled a transcendental, spiritual heaven as a superior plane of human flourishing, situated above the undesirable earthly realm of matter and sin. These intertwined philosophical threads wove a narrative that cast nature as a passive, material entity existing entirely apart from active, self-determining humans. It was thus treated as a mere trove of resources to be plundered, or as a lifeless, contextless landscape to be indiscriminately marred, polluted, and razed.
Paradoxically, at the same time nature was reduced to inanimate objecthood, it was conceptualized as obstinately wild and unruly, in need of taming and civilizing. This justification of conquest stemmed from the very same impulse that white Europeans unleashed upon the "savage" peoples they brutally colonized. The genocide, enslavement, imperialism, war, and ecocide of past and present fundamentally boil down to a question of who or what gets to be included in what sociologist Helen Fein calls the “universe of moral obligation.” The dehumanization of marginalized populations is what enables those in power to enact deadly force or deadly negligence upon them – but “dehumanization” is itself an inadequate term. The consequences of such dehumanization are only so devastating because the very act of revoking humanity is predicated on a profound disdain for the natural world. To be non-human is to be robbed of intelligence, self-determination, potentiality, and intrinsic value; to be unworthy of consideration or recognition; to be rendered inert raw material ripe for extraction. The towering mountains, the rich loamy soil, the trees that drink in golden sunlight and the birds that make homes in their canopies – as well as the many human beings who deviate from the white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual norm – are collectively exiled from the dominant universe of moral obligation.
All of this is neither inevitable nor universal, however. Many Eastern traditions, such as Daoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and especially Indigenous cultures across the globe, do not view the natural world as a realm distinct from our own. Humans reside not as superior beings atop a planetary hierarchy, but simply as one species among many interacting in a boundless, enmeshed ecological nexus.
To confront the planetary ecological crisis, we must seek to dismantle all systems of domination. We must unfetter ourselves from the hegemonic ideology that sanctions unmitigated violence and exploitation in pursuit of unhindered "progress" and material accumulation. We must reorient our relationship to the more-than-human world, understanding ourselves as co-constitutive with it, not above it. We must embrace other modes of knowing and being that center interdependence, reciprocity, and care. We must reimagine, radically.
