Tangerines, Tan Hua, Tatsoi . . . (2023– )
Tan Hua, Tangerines, Tatsoi . . . is a photographic project that explores immigrant gardening practices in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley (SGV). All throughout the SGV, Asian immigrants plant fruits, vegetables and flowers, and create informal exchange networks to trade seeds, cuttings, tools, and knowledge. They create systems of care and gift economies in which surplus produce is distributed among neighbors and loved ones. The project takes up a line of inquiry from Patricia Klindienst’s The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans; pushing back against the tendency to compare immigrants to powerless plants — the transplanted, the uprooted — she asks, “What would become visible if I focused on the immigrant as a gardener — a person who shapes the world rather than being shaped by it?”