Let Lily Kwong—and a Mountainful of Orchids—Resensitize Your Cold, Dead Heart (2024)

“I feel very proud to say that nobody said, during this installation, ‘Where’s the Instagrammable moment?’”Lily Kwong chuckles on an early Friday morning as we float amongst boughs of violet and ivory blooms that, rest assured to all who are preparing to make their New York Botanical Garden orchid show pilgrimage this spring, are nevertheless objectively grid-worthy from every angle.

At this point in her career—which includes recreating the Scottish Highlandsinside Grand Central Terminal, turning theHigh Line into a lush hanging garden, and now designing “Natural Heritage” for the 20th year of NYBG’s orchid show—the 34-year-old LA-based artist has made peace with the inevitable sensation-to-social-media pipeline: “We’re in a visual culture now—it’s just the reality.”

Kwong, dressed in a L.F. Markey jumpsuit and Air Force 1 low-tops, steps carefully around a few puddles lingering inside the conservatory. “People are shooting iconic works that have lived in peace and transformed art history for hundreds of years, and then, suddenly, those works are taken to this other vortex of Instagram,” she muses. “My husband,” (that’s comedian and actorNick Kroll) “he says it’s like, once you put the work out there, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. I’m trying to breathe into that a little bit more.”

But for Kwong, this particular workis personal: As the first woman and person of color to helm one of NYBG’s biggest traditions, she always knew she wanted this show to be more than just a maxed-out bouquet. “So much of the shows were about the beauty of the orchids, but not necessarily a biocultural approach,” Kwong explains. As a self-described second-generation immigrant growing up in Marin County, California, her own childhood was striated with ties to the neighboring natural world as well as more distant ideas of homeland, as depicted in a set of family scrolls handed down from Shanghai.

Kwong recalls sitting in her family’s living room and staring at these scrolls and their classical waveforms for hours. “It was just these beautiful images of rural China and quotidian life there—something I felt really attracted to and connected to but that was out of reach for me,” she says. “For me, the homeland can kind of feel like that, like this fantasy.” In “Natural Heritage,” Kwong has found a way to bring those mountain-scapes to life via the show’s craggy, blossom-topped forms and sets of towering stones that her team sourced from quarries by hand. The effect is subtle, even transcendent: “It felt like this deep ancestral healing to build these in real form,” Kwong says. Elements from Chinese garden design also abound, as well as references to Guanyin, the deity who Kwong calls the “energetic guide” of the show: “She’s like this goddess of compassion in the natural world, and we thought we needed that more than ever.” (Asked who she’s most excited to show the exhibit to, Kwong tells me about her plans to FaceTime her 92-year-old grandmother whose name is—for real—Jian Lan, which means “healthy orchid”).

Before I go, I’m curious how Kwong, whose work in horticulture and urban design has also sought to address issues ofnative gardening andfood insecurity, sees how these flashy, large-scale stunners, often brought to life at the behest of corporate brand partnerships, exist in conversation with her overall mission to connect people with the natural world. In response, Kwong eagerly asks me if I’ve ever been to Muir Woods. “They’re the tallest trees in the world—literally these ancient giants that are hundreds of years old,” she says, thinking back to her childhood again.

“It’s a spiritual experience walking through them,” Kwong explains. “It feels almost like a cathedral…that is my framework of how I first connected with nature. So, when I do a piece like this, or Grand Central, I’m trying to channel that frequency of awe. Because in my experience, from awe came the curiosity. Then came education, knowledge, understanding, and stewardship.”

Plus, she adds with a grin, “New Yorkers are city people who are so desensitized to nature. You have to hit ‘em withsomething.”

Once “Natural Heritage” opens to the public, Kwong’s next major project involves a pitch to the city of Los Angeles on zhuzhing up a highway median.A median? I ask, just to make sure I’m hearing right. But Kwong gets the same dreamy far-off look all the same: She’s thinking of going with native pollinators, something meaningful for the Californian bees and butterflies.

“That isn’t going to be a viral visual,” she says wryly. “I do think working with native plants has been more challenging because they’re not as—” she spreads her hands out to the profusion of blooms before us. “This is like a seduction, you know?”

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