ALPINE CONSERVATION / ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
An alpine plant conservation initiative examining how biodiversity protection intersects with livelihood, knowledge, labor, and belonging.
Alpine plants in the Hengduan Mountains survive within narrow ecological limits shaped by altitude, temperature, moisture, seasonality, and highly localized habitats. For species already occurring in small and fragmented populations, even minor environmental change can matter.
Many alpine plants do not germinate simply when water arrives. Their seeds may remain dormant until they experience prolonged cold, moisture, and seasonal change. In their native mountain habitats, winter performs this work. Once seeds leave those environments, conservation requires us to reconstruct part of that ecological sequence artificially.
Light, moisture, substrate, temperature, labels, and repeated observation turn plant survival into a practice of care. Different species require different treatments; cultivation is therefore not a single recipe but an ongoing process of observation and adjustment.
When plants return to Liju, they enter more than a botanical habitat.
After laboratory cultivation and nursery growth, alpine plants return to a living landscape. But a landscape is more than temperature, soil, and altitude.
But what exactly are we returning a plant to?
A habitat is also a livelihood, a workplace, a home, and a governed landscape.
See conservation in practice →
The same landscape can be habitat, livelihood, infrastructure, income, home, and protected space. Conservation changes how these values are recognized — and who is asked to carry their costs.
Grazing is an important household livelihood, while local testimony links intensive free-ranging livestock to bamboo decline and pressure on high-elevation vegetation. The question is not simply whether grazing creates ecological pressure, but how conservation can respond without treating livelihood as disposable.
Birdwatching, guiding, camps, and small-scale tourism can create income around biodiversity. Yet local testimony also warns that too many visitors can bring trampling, waste, and new pressure to the environments they come to see.
Botanical expertise, bird knowledge, ranger observation, household experience, and conservation institutions notice different things. Conservation becomes more just when these forms of knowledge are attributed and placed in conversation rather than absorbed into a single authoritative voice.
Children join voluntary conservation activities; households exchange labor; cultivation and monitoring depend on repeated maintenance. Participation is not only attendance at a meeting. It is also the everyday work through which conservation becomes possible.
The fieldwork did not simply give Shanhe a vocabulary for describing injustice. It changed what we believed a conservation garden should do, who should shape it, and where its benefits should travel.
Recognition — Treat local observation and lived experience as attributed knowledge alongside specialist botanical expertise.
Distribution — Treat tourism and public access as questions of scale, ecological limits, and where benefits travel.
Participation — Build future garden programming around local priorities and feedback rather than treating the village only as a site of implementation.
Care — Make cultivation, monitoring, guiding, maintenance, and household labor visible in the project narrative.
Six visual investigations into how livelihood, biodiversity, knowledge, labor, value, and authority intersect in Liju.
Explore the atlas →
An edited oral-history archive built from field conversations with people who live with, work in, study, or care for the mountain.
Enter Voices from Liju →
In Beijing, thirty pots of six alpine species entered an unused school corridor. The ecological practice traveled — but the landscape, climate, institutions, and meanings of belonging changed.
Space
Who has permission to alter an unused institutional space?
Care
Who waters, maintains, labels, and notices the plants?
Classification
Why is one plant cultivated while another is called a weed?
Belonging
What makes a plant appear to belong somewhere?
INVITED / UNINVITED · PROTECTED / WEED · CULTIVATED / SPONTANEOUS · CARED FOR / REMOVED
The mountain — Liju
Liju asks how plants return to a lived landscape. Beijing asks who — plant or person — receives permission to stay.
Shanhe translates field research and conservation practice into visual, participatory, and archival forms. These works ask how ecological knowledge can be encountered — not only read.
Artist book — 01
Two plants. Two kinds of homesickness.
A visual booklet told through two plant positions: alpine plants deliberately invited into a Beijing school corridor, and spontaneous urban plants that appear without permission.
A participatory exhibition using paper-cut forms to reinterpret high-altitude plants and ecological and cultural resilience.
SHANHE / CLOSING
We began by asking how to keep an endangered plant alive. The work led outward — from seed physiology to livelihoods, institutions, labor, knowledge, and belonging.
