In 2011, Hu Yun spent three months in London as part of an artist residency programme that saw him seconded to the Natural History Museum. This was part of an initiative to invite artists into the museum and allow them to respond to nature history by giving them access to the collection. The emphasis was on studying an area of the collection relates to the artist’s own geographical origin—China in Hu Yun’s case —and to create a work using what was learned during the research period.
For Hu Yun, this process set in motion a chain of presentations—both delicate and subtle (his work are frequently characterized by these qualities)—based on his findings concerning the historical connections between China and Britain, specifically those made through the channels of nature; on the British side, born of the Darwinian obsession with the discovery and identification of new species (and the missing links needed to perfect the chain of evolution). Not least, the eccentricities of Victorian Britain, evidenced in the men who ventured out to China in the name of discovery, and who settled—during the specific period that Hu Yun chose to explore—in the southern treaty port of Canton, today known as Guangzhou.
Victorian Britain was, at best, an age of extraordinary general curiosity about the world; at worst, of misguided do-goodery. In the middle lay the machinations driven by ambitions for trade expansion. It was this form of “discovery” that extended the bombastic adventuring of the early colonial era, when Britain claimed India. Hu Yun’s focus took its direction from a large collection of illustrations on the botanical richness of China, paintings completed in the vicinity of Guangzhou, commissioned and formed by British naturalist John Reeves (a tea inspector for the British East India Company, who devoted his leisure time in Canton to documenting the different specimens of plants and wondrous animal life that he found there).
The skills brought to these botanical and zoological illustrations, painted not in oil, but in watercolour, or Chinese mineral pigments, are astonishing. All were produced by local artists, and while distinctly Chinese in being impressions of each individual bird, fish, flower or shell, rather than scientific diagrams, they appear to capture the very essence of the natural world, fused with a breadth of life. Almost none, however, bear the name of the hand that produced them. And yet many of the new specimens found would reward the foreign adventurer-discoverer with the use of his name (while the artisans remained anonymous). John Reeves, for example, had twenty-seven species named after him, including the Reeves’s Pheasant, and the subject of Hu Yun ‘s work, The Secret Garden: Reeves’s Pheasant.
The Reeves’s Pheasant is, quite simply, gorgeous. It is no wonder that John Reeves felt impelled to introduce this unusual bird, native only to China, and with no known subspecies, into Britain in 1831 upon his return home after twenty years in China. This particular type of pheasant has the longest tail feather of all the world’s birds—a fact long know to Chinese opera performers, who used them to decorate the hat of a particular operatic figure, immediately recognizable by his headgear with its gracefully flowing feathers, and which he parades during the opera in a specially choreographed scene. This was shown here in Hu Yun’s installation, in the form of a video clip extracted from the full-length opera (like a bird plucked from its natural habitat), and shown on a monitor placed on the floor of a glass enclosure, such as one might encounter in an aviary or zoo.
The Secret garden aimed to create a space covering every element related to the essential features of a naturalist’s work, which is to say John Reeves, and the captivity involved in gathering specimens to be transported from one home to another. And so Hu Yun reconfigured the physical area provided for the installation to the exact shape of the aviary in which Reeves first saw the pheasant (the aviary of a wealthy bird fancier in Macao). That configuration was also illustrated in the form of a model aviary, a miniature version of the space in which the audience stood, placed on a plinth. This a referenced both the actual place in which Reeves first saw the pheasant and the birds final destination once it arrived on British shores—a life in captivity inevitable.
Next to the model aviary was a wooden crate, of the kind in which you’d imagine a zoology specimen to be transported, neither overly large nor suffocatingly small; it was essential that the arrived alive, and thus the crate was suitably punctured with breathing holes (sealed with gauze so that nothing could get in and nothing could escape). Adding another layer to the references here, Hu Yun chose to use the exact proportions and dimensions of the crates used by the East India Company to import opium into China at the very same time as Reeves was shipping the nation’s wildlife out.
Finally, in the far corner was a beautifully envisioned and crafted “desk”, imagined for the naturalist when engaged in his studies, littered with images of birds’ feathers. An extraordinarily delicate watercolour painting, which had been used to create patterned wallpaper, could be seen on the wall behind the desk. There was also a perfectly authentic map, such as Reeves would have used to identify the origins of his species, this one cut through in the manner Lucio Fontana applied to canvas, but in the shape of the pheasant—a red cut, also like Anish Kapoor Wound, and thus poignant, both symbolically and metaphorically.
All in all, The Secret Garden/Reeves’s Pheasant was a marvelous and well thought through work, which gained myriad nuances from being present in the current age, when China’s status is so different, and the nation less ripe for plucking at will, as was once deemed the case. Then there was the fact that it was on show in the city of Guangzhou where the story of “Reeves’s Pheasant” began. Despite all the complexities of the opium trade, of the damage that was done in its name, in terms of botanical and zoological progress, Reeves did the world at large a tremendous service, as he did, indirectly, to China’s wildlife. Form whichever point of view, from China or from the West, from both then and now, The Secret Garden/ Reeves’s Pheasant pointed viewers to issues of value, of care, of dedication and patience, of preservation and commitment—all of which are today rarely accorded such devotion in art, or in natural history in general.
