![Hu Yun, The Secret Garden: Reeves's Pheasant, 2012 - 2015](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_1600,h_1600,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/artlogicstorage/aikeart/images/view/2bd8bf98e22e5733dd595dfd33ba6d6bj/aike-hu-yun-the-secret-garden-reeves-s-pheasant-2012-2015.jpg)
![Hu Yun, The Secret Garden: Reeves's Pheasant, 2012 - 2015](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_1600,h_1600,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/artlogicstorage/aikeart/images/view/d59f7eea5513235be4df03dbb3599908j/aike-hu-yun-the-secret-garden-reeves-s-pheasant-2012-2015.jpg)
![Hu Yun, The Secret Garden: Reeves's Pheasant, 2012 - 2015](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_1600,h_1600,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/artlogicstorage/aikeart/images/view/b65fb60e84ec28bee298a0982f062365j/aike-hu-yun-the-secret-garden-reeves-s-pheasant-2012-2015.jpg)
Hu Yun 中国, 1986
1. The Officer's Desk: (180 x 80 x 100 cm)
2. The Chest of Curiosities : (90 x 65 x 85 cm)
3. Shua Lingzi (Play with the Feather): 5'36''
4. Journey: 60 x 100 cm
Further images
The Secret Garden: Reeves’s Pheasant
‘ The Secret Garden: Reeves’s Pheasant is an artistic response to the research in the field of natural history, derived from a substantive study on a particular bird endemic to China, which was recorded in Li Shizhen’s Ming dynasty Compendium of Materia Medica, and known in the West as ‘syrmaticus reevesii’(Reeves’s Pheasant). In the early nineteenth century, like other live oriental specimens, it was first introduced to Europe by John Reeves (1774-1856), who was a tea inspector for the East India Company and an amateur naturalist. From 1812 to 1831, during his stay in Canton, Reeves commissioned Chinese artisans to draw illustrations of animals and plants, and collected plants and animals new to European science. The name reevesii has been applied to nearly 30 species of animals and plants.’
In The Secret Garden: Reeves’s Pheasant Hu Yun looks back to the dawn of natural history museums, and a period of colonial and imperial activities that in this case happened to take place in China, where amateur naturalists played a significant role in identifying and naming the natural world. The specimens they identified and brought home are still the core of collections in natural history museums across Europe and America. So, in identifying a fundamental jumping off point for public museum display, Hu Yun returns to the question of how the world became defined, prompting us to think about patterns of display and how they fixed perceptions of the world, of culture, history, relevance and significance in the public consciousness. The Secret Garden II: Reeves’s Pheasant is an elegant, well thought through installation that would be at home in any natural history museum, but that deploys very contemporary means to comment on the power to decide what may represent natural history.