Book Launch: Zomia Garden | December 4, 2025 7 PM

Please join us at Bungee Space on Thursday, December 4th at 7 PM for the Zomia Garden book launch, featuring a talk and presentation by writer Yutong Lin and Ann Chen. They will share insights into their collaborative editorial process for Zomia Garden, along with field photos and videos from the project, followed by an open conversation.

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The iconic blue poppy (meconopsis) blooming above 3,500 m in Dêqên, 2024. Digital photograph. © Yutong Lin

Horse resting above 4,000 m in the Lancang-Mekong River Canyon in Dêqên, 2024. Scan of 120mm film negative. © Yutong Lin

At the foot of Yulong Snow Mountain, Lijiang, 2024. Scan of 12 mm film negative. © Yutong Lin

Hand-drawn map of early twentieth-century plant hunting sites in the Himalayan-Hengduan Mountain region, 2024. Digital photograph. Reproduced with the permission of Fang Ruizheng. © Yutong Lin

As a writer, photographer, and editor, Yutong retraced the early twentieth-century travels of Joseph F. Rock, whose encounters with his Nakhi guides, reshaped his understanding of botany, landscape, and ritual. Juxtaposing her itineraries and images with Rock’s archive, she examines the intertwined histories of colonial science, mythmaking, and local resistance embedded in botanical exploration.

Photograph of Joseph F. Rock’s image of scenes in the Yangtze Gorge, Yunnan beyond the entrance, ca. 1920s. Gelatin silver print. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7287, Joseph Francis Rock Collection

Spreads from Zomia Garden, 2025. Design: NORM.

Zomia Garden is published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, as the newest volume in the CCA Singles series as well as online publication; and an outcome of the CCA Emerging Curator Residency program.

Alongside the CCA-published photobook, a series of accompanying web essays, soundscapes, and fieldnotes by artists, musicians, and writers further elaborates the interconnected archival, scientific, and aesthetic histories of plant species across the region—threads that form, together, a constellation of trans-Himalyan exchange.

In Rhododendron Fieldnote, Ann writes about guerrilla gardening, urban ecological restoration and seed collection in New York City, framing gardening as a way to personally and physically engage with botanical history.

Artist Bio

Yutong Lin is a writer and image maker based between Montreal, Canada, and Yunnan, China. Her work explores the role of forgetfulness and misremembrance in archival practices. She traces tortuous stories, hearsay, and folk legends to map the cultural and geographic contours of Southwest China.

Ann Chen is an artist and educator currently living between Far Rockaway, Queens and Taiwan. She approaches her art practice with an interdisciplinary mind, making work that reflects her continued learning and research of the natural world and human perceptions, interactions and relationships with their environment and its ecologies.