The central panels of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is an emerald pastoral where Lilliputians emerge from resplendent crystalline and globular grottos into pools of blue water, romp, and eat vegetarian feasts. Among the many peculiar antics these people engage in is the crawling back into eggs, a game of hide and seek that Pien has us reenact to access his garden’s interior. Whereas in Bosch we are implicated in the mise–en–scène by select denizens who stare out at us, Pien adopts the 360 degree panorama to envelop us in a series of floating, circular rooms that flutter in response to movement. Foreigners in this phantasmagoria, we are encouraged to engage in rudimentary forms of interactivity such as pressing on semi-transparent walls to conjure specters lurking beneath and peering down cavernous tunnels to glimpse at faraway beings.

Benevolent ghosts in Chinese folklore are commonly represented as ugly to scare away the evils that beautiful ghosts may embody; a worldview antithetical to the pervasive depiction of the grotesque body in medieval Europe as a sign of the fall and beauty as prelapsarian. In Pien’s syncretistic Garden, however, we cavort with ghosts of cross-pollinated origins whose meanings, and hence intentions, are not so transparent.

El Convento del Carmin, Guadalajara, Mexico
University of Buffalo Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Sandra Firmin