未来植物图考 Original

The work centers on exploring the evolutionary possibilities of plants in future environments. Drawing on the knowledge system of the Qing dynasty botanist Wu Qijun’s Illustrations and Records of Plant Names and Realities, it constructs a generative atlas of plants oriented toward the future. By translating historical images and texts into computable structures, the project extracts and recombines morphological features and ecological mechanisms, transforming plants from objects of documentation into processes open to simulation and projection.
Within this system, plants are no longer merely depicted; they unfold as evolving forms through processes of deconstruction and recomposition. Taking extreme climates and environmental change as reference conditions, the work simulates adaptive trajectories, generating new plant forms that carry both historical resonance and a speculative sense of the future.
The project proposes three trajectories—“post-nature,” “system cultivation,” and “planetary adaptation”—as a framework for imagining plants under future ecological conditions, shifting species from fixed classification toward continuously generative structures. At the same time, audience drawings are translated and incorporated into the system, contributing to the ongoing growth of the atlas. In this way, Future Botanical Atlas moves beyond representation, becoming an evolving mechanism co-shaped by humans, technology, and environment, where the archive shifts from a record of the past to a system oriented toward future generation.