Weed Habit

For New York Review of Architecture, Jennifer Kabat reviews Weeds: A Germinating Theory, a novella-length photo essay by Hong Kong artist Kwan Queenie Li. Li photographs weeds around the world, and Kabat offers a stimulating commentary of Li’s work, from her theories to her photographs.

I like her idea that weeds provide “fresh understandings of the city,” from its “holes, gaps, folds, cracks, and corners.” And I love her photos, of feral flora disrupting grids, breaking the order urban planners have imposed the world over, ruin porn on a micro scale. To open to weeds is to go deep in, to notice everything we once deemed insignificant. That is how I picture Li, deep in the weeds writing: “Taking a weed’s eye view is an exhausting process.… It induces a certain sense of humility. You have to withdraw from received assumptions to greet a grand form of survival, often expressed in exquisitely miniature form.”