Review from Brian Arnold ·
With Love, from an Invader – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me by Yan Wang Preston is a complex, layered book that explores the intersections of colonialism, botany, and personal identity. It is beautifully designed, a sort of guidebook structured around the seasonal changes in the hills just outside Burnley in Lancashire, UK. It documents the life, literarily and metaphorically, of Rhododendron ponticum, the luscious flowering plants we all know and love, as found in the hills near Wang Preston’s home. The book is rooted in a very basic practice – every other day for a year, she photographed a heart-shaped cluster of rhododendrons – but evolved into a deeper, multidisciplinary narrative. Essential to her story is the history of the flowering plant, indigenous to her home in China and a trophy brought to England to illustrate the beauty of the royal conquests.
Built around this daily practice, Preston explores complex layers by including an eclectic array of narrative strategies in the book, both textual and photographic. Utilizing more than just the walks, Wang Preston found other ways to record the life of the bush – infrared trails cameras hidden within to document the animals that used it for shelter, a collection of vintage postcards featuring its rich and opulent flowers, audio recordings, and pictures she developed in her studio by bringing back and dissecting leaves, flowers, and seeds gathered during her walks. Elements of this work are developed in solitude (what photographer doesn’t love a walk alone in a rural landscape?), others in collaboration. To best illustrate this process, Wang Preston solicited a collection of 10 different essays, each providing unique and surprising perspectives for understanding the rhododendrons in the British landscape – including historical overviews, scientific studies, and documentation from regional archives – and each presented as counterpoint to her own narrative.
Remarkably, all of these unlikely layers and connections point to one thing, in Rhododendron ponticum Wang Preston saw her own life mirrored. She was born in China but later in life moved to England. Her early education was in medicine before she turned to art. As a Chinese woman, she witnessed the yoke of British imperialism (as well as being a woman – she recounts childhood experiences of seeing babies left to die in agricultural fields, for the crime of not being a boy) and often felt labeled by the same terms used to describe the plants, ‘non-native’ and ‘invasive,’ or as she notes:
For me, the rhododendron land felt closer to home for two reasons: we have rhododendrons in China, and we love them; however, here in the UK, both the rhododendrons and people like me are seen as ‘non-native’ and in some circumstances, possible ‘invasive,’ so we had a kind of ‘trauma bond.’ (p.196)
Building on this idea, she discovered subtle and beautiful ways to express her own life, found in a heart-shaped shrub just a short distance from her home; her regular walks provided a meditation, an opportunity for her to explore her own history and identity. The layered analysis of rhododendrons presented in With Love, from an Invader create elusive connections to Wang Preston’s own experiences but ultimately represent displayed and recontextualized lives trying to adapt to their environments, the ‘non-native.’
With Love, from an Invader – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me is divided into five different sections, each individuated by a season – Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring – and color – pink, purple, beige, white, and green. Each of these sections includes Wang Preston’s photographs of the heart-shaped rhododendron (the backbone of the book), the trail-cam photographs of the different animals visiting the shrub, and the written contributions. As I repeatedly view the heart-shaped cluster, I am surprised both by how much and how little changes from day to day, even over the course of the year. The book offers a compelling narrative about Wang Preston’s experiences as a Chinese immigrant living in England – like the heart-shaped plant, everything and nothing changes.
Contributing Editor Brian Arnold is a writer, photographer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY.
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Yan Wang Preston – With Love, from an Invader – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me
Photographer: Yan Wang Preston
Publisher: The Eriskay Connection, with Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh
Editors: Yan Wang Preston, Emma Nicolson, Alan Elliot
Essays: Emma Nicolson, Alan Elliott, Bergit Arends, Mattew Gandy, Monty Adkins, Michale Pritchard, Liam Devlin
Interview: Cosima Towneley
Poem: Kate Kinoshita
Perfect-bound softcover with tabs: 170 x 240 mm (6.7 x 9.5 in); 320 pages; English; ISBN: 9789493363212
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