Meng Du: In the woods, might be late

In the exhibition In the woods, might be late, artist Meng Du reflects on how the life of her garden has quietly reshaped her perception. Presented at Fou Gallery in New York and curated by Sharon Xiaorong Liu (December 6, 2025–February 22, 2026), the exhibition borrows its title from Peter Handke’s documentary to propose a slower and more humble mode of coexistence with botanical life. Through the light, transparency, and fragility of glass, Du gives form to her way of seeing plants, an imperfect imagination that can never fully grasp their alterity, yet one she refuses to abandon. She tends without denying control, imagines without claiming understanding, working slowly through trimming, tending, casting, and shaping.

The story starts with, according to Meng Du’s naming traditions, “The Beard” (pulsatilla), “Little Barberry” (Japanese barberry that ambushes humans with their thorns), and “Lazy Big Brother” (a rose bush that never blooms) in her garden. Naming is her first step toward building a relationship with botanical life, not taxonomy but a recognition of mutual influence. In We Are the Coming Forest (2025), inspired by cockleburs and maple seeds, Du crafts minuscule glass sculptures that mimic the parasitical act of clinging to others, while in her mosaics series, shattered glass resembling rose thorns, which almost scratch the artist’s hands, is fixed in mosaic grout to reflect her encounter with botanical defense. Both works unfold around the artist’s careful negotiation with plants. Du’s glass thorns, transparent and brittle, seem to mock their own metaphorical weight—neither defensive nor threatening, merely breakable. The exhibition also poses questions: Are thorns truly plants’ “weapons,” or is this just us humans projecting? Has this kind of humanistic attribution become overly romanticized, even facile? Have stories about “the weapons of the weak” become a contemporary art cliché, appearing so frequently that they have lost their critical edge?

This project honors plants’ survival wisdom and a gardener’s labor without resolving the tension between care and control. Humans’ romanticization of plant “resistance” may obscure the actual control we exert over them—the pruning, the cultivating, the deciding what lives and what gets cut away. In All That is Cut Away Becomes Constellations (2025), Du recasts recycled glass bottles into sculptures of plants’ “deadheading” tools, mirroring the logic of pruning, an act of subtraction that paradoxically nurtures a more vigorous life form. The project also favors slower, quotidian, even seemingly “futile” modes of being-with, operating across different scales of time. In To Leave, To Arrive (2025), the dove tree becomes a witness connecting deep pasts to uncertain futures. In A Call From… (2025), a cast-glass telephone carved like a cedar cone, alongside spiral mesh tubes containing seed-like wooden beads, forms a threshold linking human time with plant time, suggesting that our anxieties and disruptions are brief interruptions in a longer conversation between life forms and their environments.
Du’s practice depends entirely on humanistic imagination. Her glass sculptures hold this contradiction without resolving it: they aspire towards the multiple temporalities that plants inhabit while acknowledging our imperfect imaginative capacity. In the woods, we might be late to understand, to act, but perhaps not too late to stay, to tend, and to keep trying to listen.

*The press release is based on the curatorial essay by Sharon Xiaorong Liu, edited by Iris Zhang.