Kayung Lai
Oriental Gardens
The concept of the Orient as ‘Other’ has been vivid in the Western imagination since the beginning of global trade. Historically, artistic licence has been taken in romanticising the Orient, depicting it as a world filled with mystery, and fanciful fauna and flora. This representation has dominated the Western expression of the Orient, a fantasy fully expressed in early 18thcentury material culture.
By documenting various Oriental gardens found within southern England, this body of work seeks to reveal the continuation of this mythical discourse by oscillating between the fantastical features of these Oriental gardens and the tell-tale signs of their British location. The objects that characterise these gardens as ‘Oriental’ exist within the broader Western discourse on far- eastern cultures. This is a discourse that, in this instance, reveals just as much about the imagination of the British gardener as it does about the particulars of the Oriental landscape. Instead it reveals and reflects upon the cultural hybridity present within our globalised world.