Weed Commons

2016. Commissioned by Times Museum, Guangzhou.

Situated at the edge of Guangzhou, Times Museum is surrounded by a diverse range of spaces: an abandoned farmland, a Qing Dynasty temple, small auto shops, state-owned factories, urban slums, and new apartment buildings for the middle class. But visitors to the museum rarely pay attention to the museum’s dynamic neighborhood. Zheng Bo organized two workshops with the public to transplant weeds from surrounding communities into the museum to create a weed map. A series of discussions were also held to investigate the relationship between museum, community, and ecology.