Kaitlin Hsu - Plans for a Garden

Project Description

“I find flowers beautiful. The work of French Modernists as well. But, the aesthetic pleasure I experience with both is tinged with an undercurrent of unease. To me, they will always be haunted by the image of the Asian woman as ‘Lotus Blossom.’” — Kaitlin Hsu

Plans for a Garden is a series of web poems located within a map of Claude Monet’s Giverny garden. The work addresses a trope in Western art to stereotype Asian women as delicate and decorative by representing them as inanimate objects such as flowers. Curious to disentangle her aesthetic love of flowers from these harmful connotations, Kaitlin Hsu cultivates her thoughts in a variety of formats. The webpages include concrete poetry, a collection of animated gifs, a prompt for embodiment, and an interactive desktop. Traverse the garden and see where your mind wanders.

Perfect for fans of experimental poetry formats, approachable film theory, Asian cultural studies, art history, and feminism—as well as for those who feel conflicted about something they love.

Artist Bio

Kaitlin Hsu is a queer Taiwanese poet, translator, and editor from the Bay Area. Her writing has been published in A Public Space, Poet Lore, the Bellingham Review, and more. She is a 2024 Asian American Margins Fellow and Brooklyn Poets Fellow, currently working at Kaya Press as an associate editor. Hsu graduated from Stanford University with studies in English (poetry) and Computer Science (biocomputation). She also makes crosswords.