Meng Du: In the woods, might be late

Sharon X. Liu

November 2025

Artist Meng Du’s practice often begins from the alliances she forms with the living world around her. This exhibition at Fou Gallery, New York featuring Du’s most recent body of work centers the artist’s reflection of how nature in her garden has shaped her perception. Borrowing its title from the documentary Peter Handke: In the Woods, Might Be Late, this exhibition proposes a slower and more humble mode of coexistence with botanical life. Du uses glass’s light, transparency, and fragility to give form to how she sees plants. It is an imperfect imagination that will never fully grasp their alterity, yet one she refuses to abandon. She tends without denying control, imagines without claiming understanding, doing slowly, through the repetitive work of trimming, tending, casting, and shaping.

The story starts from, 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 plants is the first step toward building a relationship with botanical life. It is by no means scientific taxonomy, but rather an acknowledgment of how these beings affect the artist and are affected by her in specific ways. In We Are the Coming Forest (2025), Du draws inspiration from cockleburs and maple seeds that mobilize external forces to journey far from their origins. She creates miniscule glass sculptures that mimic the parasitical act of clinging to others. In Du's mosaic series, shattered glass resembling thorns of rose stems, which almost scratch the artist’s hands, are fixed by mosaic grout to reflect her encounter with botanical defense.

Both works unfold around the artist’s careful negotiation with plants. The weak become powerful through knowing when to let go and when to hold on and attack. Yet, Du's glass thorns, transparent and brittle, seem to mock their own metaphorical weight. They are neither defensive nor threatening, merely breakable. This exhibition also poses a number of immediate 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've lost their critical edge?

On the one hand, this project honors plants’ survival wisdom and a gardener's everyday labor. On the other hand, it does not attempt to resolve the tension between care and control. Our romanticization of plant "resistance" may have obscured the actual control we exert over them—the pruning, the cultivating, the deciding what lives and what gets cut away. Du's work expands on the opacity of the power asymmetry. In All That is Cut Away Becomes Constellations (2025), the artist recasts recycled glass bottles into sculptures of plants’ “deadheading” gardening tools. The art-making process parallels the very logic of pruning, an act of subtraction that paradoxically nurtures a more vigorous life form.

This project is not about provocation or activism. Du does not long for faster action, but slower, more quotidian, even seemingly "futile" modes of being-with. These modes simply operate on different scales of time. To Leave, To Arrive (2025) features the dove tree, a species that has persisted through dramatic geological shifts for millions of years, becoming a witness connecting deep pasts to uncertain futures. In A Call From…(2025), a cast-glass telephone reveals a hollow interior carved in the shape of a cedar cone, like an insect in an amber. It looks as if the cone itself were calling out to people across a vast stretch of time. Alongside it, two telephone receiver sculptures extend into spiral metal mesh tubes containing small wooden beads resembling seeds. The telephone structures become a threshold connecting human time with plant time. Our anxieties and disruptions, when placed against such a scale, are merely interruptions in a longer conversation between life forms and their environments.

Du’s practice depends entirely on humanistic imagination, which is both our only available tool to understand and our fundamental limitation. 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.