it was never meant to be said

Single-channel video, installation, mixed-media, 2024-2025

it was never meant to be said is an installation composed of a single-channel essay video and five vertical structures made of translucent green-house wave plate. Centered on the East Asian medicinal orchid Dendrobium nobile, cultivated for decades by the father in a small home greenhouse, the work traces how intimate practices of care are entangled with the residual histories of colonial botany. The orchid appears not as a mere biological specimen but as a material–mnemonic medium in which the traces of East Asia–Europe plant extraction are condensed and altered through nonhuman temporality. Its life does not end with historical displacement; through the father's routines of watering, ventilation and light adjustment, it acquires a second, intimate life shaped by sensory attunements that are domestic yet never fully detached from larger histories. The video weaves together footage filmed by the artist, recordings from the father’s orchid room and archival materials accumulated over many years. Narration drawn and re-edited from the artist’s book Purple Terror follows three threads: heritable memory, the disciplining nature of care and the nonlinear temporalities of plant life. Text and image do not illustrate one another but remain in parallel, occasionally drifting or colliding, forming a partial and unsettled temporality, a future that has already passed or a present not yet fully arrived. The vertical structures recall both orchid support stakes and the translucent surfaces of greenhouse walls, holding protection and containment in the same frame. Filled only with perlite, without soil or roots, they present the material residue of care once its function has been removed and reveal how care slips between nurturing and regulation, and how domestic space harbors tensions between intimacy and control. 

In this work, “healing” is not framed as restoration but as a subtle recalibration of affect and perception, a slow and unstable process in which relations are re-formed. Rather than aiming at an idealised future, the installation lingers in unfinished forms of belonging that emerge through shared vulnerability and uncertain attachment.