Communing with Nature in Lo Lai Lai’s “Give no words but mum”

Next to the gallery entrance was the video Talking Plant (2019), which opens with a shot of unkempt grassland. Two men sitting in the distance appear unfazed as a patch of grass in the foreground goes up in flames. “Can they really not hear?” asks a woman in voiceover. To clips of found footage from TV shows in which people attempt to communicate with plants, the narrator dismisses their methods—mostly talking at plants as if expecting a verbal reply—as pointless and anthropocentric. She instead suggests a more empathetic approach, imagining, for instance, what a plant would say to pollinating bees in an attempt to imbue these silent entities with a more authentic “voice.” 

By contrast, in Like a stone, vain hope (2020), projected on the other side of the gallery, the plant has no imagined voice or thoughts at all. Again in voiceover, a woman interrogates the plant as if it were under arrest; receiving no answer, she seeks to determine its recent whereabouts through visible clues, commenting on the state of its leaves and its reaction to light and sound. At the end of the video, the narrator’s initial aggression gradually turns into an appreciation of the plant’s unrelenting refusal to hold superficial conversations with human beings. She poses one final question: “Can I remain silent, like you?” 

The notion of establishing a nonverbal understanding with nature is explored in an interactive installation composed of two chairs between two potted plants, located in the center of the main exhibition space. Attached to the plants are sensor-activated light bulbs that flash upon human contact.

Through these intimate plant-human encounters, Lo points to the coexistence of humankind and nature, and suggests ways to better empathize with nonhuman elements in our environment.