This pair of drawings were made during a 2019 spring-time residency on Jeju Island in

South Korea and exhibited at the Chusa Memorial Museum dedicated to the country’s iconic

scholar-artist Chusa Kim Jeong-hui.

​

The Roots of the Orchid: 

​

During his time in political exile on Jeju Island, Chusa painted his famous series of orchids. One of the ‘four noble gentlemen’ of traditional Chinese painting, orchids are renowned for their ability to grow and blossoms in barren environments, and scholarartists used them as a metaphor for resilience, nobility, and humility. Around 10% of all flowering plants species are now known to be orchids, and scientists are currently digitizing the orchid genome to map the vast evolutionary history of all known orchids.

​

By comparing genome sequences, they can estimate the time at which the most primitive orchids diverged or ‘split off’ from other orchids. This gives a clearer idea of when the ‘Most Recent Common Ancestor’ (MRCA) of all orchids existed, now believed to be around 200 million years ago at the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs.

​​

Tear glands, tear ducts, tear drops:

​

At the centre of Jeju Island is Hallasan, the highest mountain in South Korea. In satellite photographs Jeju and the volcano resembles an enormous eye staring upwards from the ocean. Hallasan is surrounded by over 300 smaller volcanoes that protrude abruptly among the fields. From 2013 to 2015 a team of Korean Geologists positioned 20 seismographic stations across Jeju to record vibrations passing through the island from earthquakes across Asia.

 

When they analysed the data they discovered colossal ‘magma plumbing system’ up to 60 km deep. In the top part of this drawing Jeju is drawn from above like an anatomical diagram of an eye, complete with eye lashes, tear glands and tear ducts. The earthquake detectors are shown as concentric circles. Beneath this, Hallasan resembles the splash of a tear drop falling in to in the ocean, with its vast magma structures below the earth’s surface.

​

Full Project Details: Orchids on a Volcano