# Vegetal Realism: Toward an Ethical Engagement with Plant Life in Contemporary Art ## Vegetal Realism: Toward an Ethical Engagement with Plant Life in Contemporary Art Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference 2025 Giovanni Aloi, *Professor, School of the Art Institute, Chicago; Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture* ![](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-02/Peach-01.png?itok=ee1hmMhA) ### Vegetal Realism: Toward an Ethical Engagement with Plant Life in Contemporary Art In Jan Van Huysum’s *Still Life with Flowers and Fruit* (c. 1715), nothing breathes. Every stem and petal is caught in a spell, pressed between beauty and death. Zoomorphism and anthropomorphism entwine, unmoored from any season. A hyperrealistic paradox, this Dutch Golden Age masterpiece masks beneath its luminous chiaroscuro a fragile assemblage of temporal impossibilities, painstakingly collaged. A true miracle: These flowers never bloomed together; these leaves never brushed one another. Some of these stalks were painted in gardens and greenhouses; many were painted individually by other artists. Van Huysum copied and pasted them from herbals and paintings to compose a visual text in which Christian values are evident in nature’s blooms. Pale roses symbolized love, their candor linked to the purity of the Virgin Mary. Tuberose spoke of the perils of temptations and dangerous sensual desires. Such symbolic subjugation filled the silence of plants with human voices, derived from chromatic or olfactory allusions. In this sense, Dutch Golden Age still lifes are the epitome of an early form of “plant-blindness,” a concept theorized by botanists James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, meaning the cognitive and cultural bias that renders plant life invisible, insignificant, or interchangeable in the human imagination.[1](#references) Though plants in a floral still life may appear to be the true subject, dominating the canvas, they remain passive objects, a creation of colonialist, extractionist logics removed from their natural environments and constrained by an anthropocentric iconography. As our gaze rolls over the excruciatingly detailed petals and leaves, this painterly paradigm plays a cruel trick: The canvas is not a window onto the world, but a mirror. Through its linguistic structure, these flowers bloom into metaphors. All they speak about is us. To fill the silence of plants with our own voices has always been, in essence, a political and propagandistic act. This symbolic subjugation reflects and reinforces a worldview in which nature exists to serve human understanding and control. Many of the flowers depicted in such paintings, like tulips, roses, and exotic fruits, were intimately tied to early global trade routes, colonial botany, and the expanding commodification of nature. By transforming them into pure symbols divorced from their ecological and geopolitical realities, artists and patrons concealed the histories of displacement and labor. *Optical realism* names this representational power, which naturalizes our dominion over nature. I want to develop an alternative mode—what I will call *vegetal realism*—that centers the agency, histories, and ecological significance of plant life. The idiom of optical realism rests on its exasperated attention to detail, insisting that what is seen is entirely true, utterly clear, and self-evident. In realism, truth is presumed to reside on the surface, and is thus treated as indisputable. Realism remains conceptually slippery, however, as the term differs across disciplines.[2](#references) The art historians Michael Fried and W.J.T. Mitchell explored conceptions of absorption and theatricality. Mitchell argued that a highly naturalistic image *acts* as if it were “not a sign” at all​, presenting an unmediated view. This is a *performance* in the sense that the image is actively claiming authenticity and persuading the viewer. Mitchell emphasizes that we, as viewers, become actors in the performance. However, our role remains mostly passive. We engage in what Mitchell elsewhere calls a “double consciousness” with images: We intellectually know an image is a constructed representation, yet we emotionally or perceptually respond to it as if it were real. Realism thus performs reality so convincingly that we momentarily forget the performance. Ideologies are subliminally transmitted through a visible logic that purports realistic representation.[3](#references) Optical realism re-emerged from classical Greek and Roman aesthetics during the Renaissance as a philosophical and cultural anchor to a dramatically shifting world. With the rediscovery of classical antiquity that followed the Black Death, the development of linear perspective laid the foundations of modern anthropocentrism as Renaissance artists sought not only to mirror the visible but to affirm the legibility of the world.[4](#references) Nature could now be rendered with precision, its parts measured, its space rationalized. In this sense, realism was not a passive imitation but an active moral and epistemological stance: a means of demonstrating that truth could be clearly seen, and that vision, properly trained, could ultimately guide the soul. In *The* *Order of Things*, Michel Foucault argued that Renaissance painters affirmed a new regime of visuality based on representation, spatial coherence, and perspectival realism. He called this new approach Quattrocento painting, its images relying on a type of realism capable of ordering knowledge. Through the rationalization and modularity of space, painting affirmed the visibility and intelligibility of the world as something knowable through the eye. Realism thus structured the relation between subject and object; between what is seen, who sees, and what can be said about what is seen.[5](#references) Throughout the history of Western art, different forms of optical realism remained of paramount importance until the Impressionists, during the second half of the 19th century, used color to fragment the deceptive cohesiveness of the picture plane. Until then, the camera obscura aided the topographical realism of Canaletto, the relic-like indexical accuracy of early photograms, the documentaristic rawness of the French Realist movement, the pious Medieval-infused realism of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the languid realism of Orientalist fantasies. Indexically constructed realism shaped a naturalized world of Western centrality. But far from objectively representing the world, the exponential growth of image consumption in modernity maintained realism’s ideologies with potency. The socialist, filmic, fascist, and hyper forms of realism that followed all shared the same root: political affirmation. Whether it served to glorify racial superiority, expose social inequity, or document the alienation of modern life, realism continued to insist on the surface as truth’s domain. What began as an affirmation of the world’s intelligibility naturalized itself as a powerful visual rhetoric, convincing us that what we see is what we must believe. In contrast, the cubist experimentations of Picasso and Braque and the abstract explorations of Hilma af Klint fragmented the visual plane and obliterated realistic detail, thereby opening previously unseen speculative dimensions through which the viewer was invited to actively partake. This shift questioned the knowability of the world. Optical realism and modern abstraction are both, in different ways, world-forming approaches to representation. But because of its insistence on pronouncing defined and unquestionable truth, optical realism operates on a different plane: one that more often than not suppresses ambiguity in favor of legibility and privileges clarity over complexity. It offers a vision of the world as already known, already ordered, already mastered, and often objectified. In doing so, it frequently forecloses the alterity of vegetal life, reducing plants to fixed, decipherable signs within a visual taxonomy rather than allowing them to appear as dynamic, entangled, and unknowable beings in their own right. Throughout the last century, the representation of plants in art has undergone substantial transformations that amount to a progressive form of liberation from optical realism’s symbolic shackles. Yet presenting living plants in the place of painted or photographed ones didn’t systematically lead to a process of de-objectification. The most provocative and politically charged encounters with live plants, like Edward Steichen’s groundbreaking exhibition of gigantified delphiniums at MoMA in 1936, disrupted the conception of the static nature of art objects, introducing ephemerality and growth into the Western artistic discourse as well as questioning the role of the artist in the context of creation. But the political component of the work hinged on the concept of a generalized vegetal nature summoned by the delphinium, rather than the plant’s history, identity, or enmeshment in networks of becoming. The appearances of plants in the exhibiting space that followed, such as in Hélio Oiticica’s *Tropicália* (1967) or Marcel Broodthaers’ many installations featuring potted palms, expanded Steichen’s conceptual domain. In *Tropicália*, Oiticica transformed the gallery into a sensorial environment—a garden labyrinth populated by live palms and ficuses, gravel, sand, and live parrots—inviting viewers to inhabit Brazil’s geopolitical and cultural contradictions. Likewise, Broodthaers’ palms ironized the museum’s colonial legacies and the exoticization of nature while calling into question the institutional framing of what we call truth. In both cases, plants were conceptually charged; they disrupted expectations of passivity and permanence while introducing a spatial and temporal unruliness into the confining, aesthetic regime of the institution. But these representations remained steeped in plant-blindness. The alterity of plants was blurred and subsumed into a generic and vague conception of vegetality as a symbolic stand-in for nature as a cultural construct. All throughout the recent growth in interest in plants for art, a plethora of artists have rushed to paint, film, sculpt, and display plants without fully digesting the important insights generated by critical plant-studies research. These artists simply perpetuate old tropes, sometimes only partially reconfiguring them through new media. In *Art on My Mind: Visual Politics* (1995), bell hooks offers a profound critique of realism within the context of race, gender, and power. She challenges the presumed neutrality of the gaze, asserting that visual regimes are often shaped by white supremacy and patriarchy. The author hooks explains how realism in art can either reinforce or challenge dominant ideologies, particularly through the work of Black artists.[6](#references) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician, articulates a form of realism deeply rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. Departing from Western realist traditions that often prioritize objectivity and linear narratives, Simpson’s approach centers on Nishnaabeg ways of knowing, emphasizing relationality, land-based knowledge, and the interconnection of all beings. Through storytelling, walks with elders, and engagement with creation stories, Simpson illustrates how Nishnaabeg realism is not merely a representational tool but a lived practice that affirms Indigenous sovereignty and resists colonial frameworks. It is across these conceptual coordinates and through a range of media that new and more complex forms of realism have been emerging recently.[7](#references) The Nigerian-born visual artist Otobong Nkanga maps histories of diasporas and identity: Her plant-focused installations emerge within a cartography of broken landscapes, foregrounding the psychic and material wounds inflicted by colonial economies. In works like *Diaspore* (2014),[8](#references) women of African descent balance potted night-blooming jasmines on their heads as they move across a map evoking both the grids of geographical atlases and the choreographic diagrams used to teach dance steps. Nkanga’s choice of plant species is not coincidental and cannot be reduced to a simple stand-in for an abstract notion of “nature,” nor even a generic plant. *Cestrum nocturnum* is commonly called night-blooming jasmine, but it isn’t a jasmine. It is a species of plant in the potato family of the *Solanaceae*, rather than the *Oleaceae*, to which jasmines belong. Originally native to the West Indies, the plant is now cultivated worldwide as an ornamental species. Its remarkable adaptability (it is found in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere) and resilience have rendered it difficult to control, leading to its classification as an invasive species in many parts of the world.[9](#references) In Nkanga’s work, performers bear this history and its layered burdens across their bodies, balancing it on their heads and shoulders. Precious Okoyomon’s work similarly reveals a deep attentiveness to the plants with which she collaborates. The connection between plants, people, and soil as a form of social justice was central in *To See the Earth Before the End of the World*, a plant-filled installation presented at *The Milk of Dreams*, the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.[10](#references) Across the space, kudzu and sugarcane were allowed to grow freely throughout the exhibition’s duration, gradually enveloping the towering figures made of soil and straw that Okoyomon positioned throughout the space. Were they ancestral guardians? Pantheistic deities? Posthuman futures in waiting? Their austere postures and watchful stillness hinted at the possibility of a world reborn; one in which human centrality is no longer assumed. Okoyomon’s installation was immediate in its sensory force—the humidity, the earthy scent, the lush entanglement of life—and yet deeply historical. Kudzu and sugarcane are bound by related legacies of displacement, domestication, and environmental harm. Native to Japan, kudzu was introduced to the United States during the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Decades later, in the 1930s, the U.S. government promoted its use to combat soil erosion, a problem largely caused by sugarcane monoculture on Southern slave plantations.[11](#references) These two plants, both Asian natives forcibly transplanted to American soil under vastly different conditions, carry with them histories of ecological manipulation and colonial violence. In Okoyomon’s work, their roots intertwine: an entanglement not just of species, but of memory, exploitation, and the comforting possibility of regeneration. It is in the context of these new approaches to plant life in the gallery space that my interest in the tension between aesthetic modalities and politics has grown, particularly as, over the past two decades, artists have turned to plants to articulate political concerns related to gender, social critique, decolonization, identity, and migration. These artists craft new forms of realism that, while acknowledging and harnessing the inherent power of realist aesthetic languages, also reclaim space for speculative phyto-dimensions to unfold. Rather than imposing allegorical or symbolic meanings onto plants, their work foregrounds, and never erases, histories of extraction, displacement, and labor, as well as the capacity of plants to shape landscapes, entangle human and more-than-human relations, and embody memory. This kind of artistic engagement with plant life, I believe, has become widespread enough to qualify as a distinct artistic category in its own right, one marked by particular modes of interaction, deliberate aesthetic choices, and a shared way of knowing. I’ve come to describe this approach as *vegetal realism*. In essence, vegetal realism is an ethical-aesthetic approach that centers on the unique agency, histories, and ecological significance of specific and situated plant life. It forges connections and foregrounds entwinements between vegetal-being and human histories of displacement, resilience, and co-evolutions. It prioritizes acts of witnessing, regeneration, and respectful co-creation over instrumental representation, seeking to honor and respect the alterity of plants while illuminating interdependent networks of cultural, ecological, and political meaning. As a complex semantic form, vegetal realism, unlike classical optical realism, no longer seeks to manipulate the viewer through affirmative paradigms. It leverages iconic and indexical registers of representation to politicalize plant presence in non-anthropocentric constructs. Notable examples of vegetal realism can be found in the works of Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio and Tʼuyʼtʼtanat-Cease Wyss. Aparicio does not depict trees, but creates relics of their lived pasts to foreground entwined and very real histories of exploitation and subjugation through meticulous rubber castings of ceiba and ficus bark. These trees, native to Central and South America, now rooted in the urban fabric of Los Angeles, have become familiar staples in the LA landscape for decades, especially in disadvantaged Salvadoran communities where the artist grew up.[12](#references) The artist engages with plants as both living material and witness. The heightened realism of indexicality is at the heart of his process. The surfaces Aparicio captures are direct imprints: Scars, carvings, cracks, and growths are recorded in all their topographical precision. These “skins” are not merely aesthetic objects, but testimonies—silent archives of coexistence, resilience, and erasure. Aparicio’s use of rubber from the *Castilla elastica* tree, a species native to El Salvador and a vegetal material historically extracted by pre-Hispanic Indigenous cultures before colonialism, reinforces his cross-cultural witnessing. The rubber remembers: Once poured, it transcribes the form of whatever it touches with haunting fidelity, echoing the intimate truth-telling of a death mask.[13](#references) Both trees, ficus and ceiba, are now being cut down across LA as their strong root systems rip up the city sidewalks. Aparicio sees the roots of these trees as entwined with those of immigrant communities being dispossessed on American soil. By preserving and presenting the trees’ physical history, Aparicio embraces their alterity. He does not overwrite their surfaces with human symbolism but allows their own stories—botanical, cultural, and ecological—to surface. In doing so, he resists the long-standing impulse to mute or moralize plant life through allegory. Instead, his work foregrounds the lived histories of these trees as their fate echoes that of the communities that once found shelter beneath them. In their monumental, shroud-like appearance, Aparicio’s tree skins are not metaphors. They are interventions, making visible the imprint of lives otherwise overlooked and connecting environmental degradation to social displacement. Discarded, old clothing embedded into the rubber amplifies this intersectionality. In Aparicio’s work, the plant is not an object of representation, but a co-narrator in the telling of truths too often buried; truths that cling to the surface, raw and irreducible. Collaborating with live plants outside the confines of the gallery space, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss’s land-based artistic practice exemplifies a different iteration of vegetal realism. As an interdisciplinary artist, ethnobotanist, and community educator of Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, Indigenous Hawaiian, and Swiss descent, Wyss has, for more than three decades, cultivated spaces where Indigenous plants and knowledge systems are not only preserved but actively revitalized within urban landscapes.[14](#references) In projects such as *x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ New Growth* (2019–2025),[15](#references) Wyss has transformed a neglected urban lot into a vibrant garden teeming with native flora. This garden and others she has created are meticulously designed using permaculture principles. It incorporates traditional Coast Salish design motifs—ovals, crescents, and triangles—that reflect Indigenous cosmologies and relationships to the land. The plant beds are populated with species native to the Pacific Northwest, such as yarrow, wild rose, and kinnikinnick, each selected for their ecological roles and cultural significance. Wyss’s gardens are not static installations but dynamic, living ecosystems that engage with the community through workshops, storytelling, and communal gatherings. Events like seed-blessing ceremonies and mushroom harvesting workshops serve as places for intergenerational knowledge exchange, fostering a deeper understanding of Indigenous plant use and land stewardship. Central to Wyss’s practice is the concept of bioremediation*.* The type of realism she deploys straddles scientific, artistic, and mystical realms through a collaboration with specific living plants gathered to heal and restore contaminated soils. In collaboration with artist Anne Riley, the project *A Constellation of Remediation* (2017–2019) involved planting Indigenous remediation gardens on vacant lots throughout Vancouver, British Columbia. These gardens not only address environmental degradation but also serve as acts of decolonization, reclaiming spaces for Indigenous communities and practices. Wyss’s work embodies the essence of vegetal realism by honoring the intrinsic value and agency in plant life. Her gardens are not mere representations but active participants in cultural resurgence and ecological healing. Every plant is carefully chosen because of its history, cultural meaning, and ecological role. Wyss invites us to reconsider our relationships with plants as vital, sentient beings intertwined with our histories and futures. At a time of escalating climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and ecological unraveling, the ethics of representation—especially of the vegetal—are more pressing than ever. To objectify plants today, to render them mute symbols or mere decorative motifs, is not only aesthetically regressive but ethically untenable. Vegetal realism challenges this legacy by insisting that plants are not passive backdrops to human narratives, but protagonists in their own right: living agents shaping and shaped by the Anthropocene. Vegetal realism thus emerges as a productive ethical framework. Rather than imposing symbolic meanings, it emphasizes an empathetic alignment with the unique identities, histories, and agencies of plants.​ Instead of generalizing, disembodying, and abstracting, as other artistic approach do, vegetal realism prioritizes specific realities, and relational agencies of more-than-human life grounded in geopolitical milieus. This paradigm does not reject symbolism outright. It advocates for a thoughtful integration where symbolism arises organically, stemming from the plant’s identity. By foregrounding the plant’s own narratives, artists create works that are multidimensional, intertwining political, ecological, biological, and mythological threads. They refuse the anthropocentric gaze and invite a more engaged and attentive way of seeing. ### Author Biography Giovanni Aloi, PhD, is an art historian, editor, and curator specializing in environmental politics and the representation of nature in art. Aloi has published numerous books, including *Art & Animals* (I.B Tauris, 2011), *Speculative Taxidermy* (Columbia University Press, 2018), *Botanical Speculations* (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), *Why Look at Plants?* (Brill | Rodopi, 2019), *Lucian Freud Herbarium* (Prestel, 2019), *Estado Vegetal* (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2023), *Vegetal Entwinements* (co-edited with Michael Marder, The MIT Press, 2023), *Botanical Revolutions* (Getty Publications, 2025), and *Lawn (Object Lesson)* (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). He has contributed to BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, is a U.S. correspondent for *Esse Magazine*, and a speaker at the Art Institute of Chicago. ![Giovanni Aloi headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-02/Screen-Shot-2021-11-18-at-10.26.39-AM-1-e1637249355169_faculty.png?itok=ugdKVM97) ### Footnotes 1 James H Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler “Preventing Plant Blindness,” *The American Biology Teacher* 61*.*2 (1999): 82–86. [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 2 See Laura Mulvey, *Visual and Other Pleasures* (Palgrave Macmillan, 1989); W.J.T. Mitchell, *Picture Theory* (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Marcia Crosby, “The Construction of the Imaginary Indian” in *Academic Reading: Reading and Writing in the Disciplines,* ed. Janet Giltrow (Broadview Press, 2002); Michael Fried, *Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before* (Yale University Press, 2008); bell hooks, *Art on My Mind: Visual Politics* (New Press, 1995); Michel Foucault, *The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences* (Routledge, 1996); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, *Objectivity* (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Leanne Simpson, *Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence* (Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011). [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 3 Mitchell, *Picture Theory*. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 4 Erwin Panofsky, *Perspective as Symbolic Form* (Princeton University Press, 2020). [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 5 Foucault, *Order of Things*. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 6 hooks, *Art on My Mind*. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 7 Simpson, *Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back.* [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 8 Otobong Nkanga, *Diaspore*, 2014, performance art, 14 Rooms Live Art Exhibition, Messe Basel, Basel, Switzerland. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 9 Quentin C. B. Cronk et al., *Plant Invaders: The Threat to Natural Ecosystems* (Chapman & Hall, 1995) 146. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 10 Precious Okoyomon, *To See the Earth Before the End of the World,* 2022, installation, *The Milk of Dreams,* 59th Venice Biennale. [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 11 Yota Batsaki, “The Plant at the End of the World: Precious Okoyomon’s Invasive Art,” *Critical Inquiry* 50. 4 (Summer 2024). [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 12 Maximilíano Durón, “Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio Captures the Materiality of Disappearance and Resistance,” Art in America, February 26, 2024, [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 13 “MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 2023, [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 14 Anne-Marie Dubois, “T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss - Portfolio - Esse - Art.” *Esse* website, 2024, [https://esse.ca/en/portfolios/tuyttanat-cease-wyss/.&nbsp](https://esse.ca/en/portfolios/tuyttanat-cease-wyss/. );[\[Return to Section\]](#section5) 15 T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss, *x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓* (*New Growth*)*,* 2019–2025, public garden installation in partnership with 221A, Semi-Public 半公開, 271 Union Street, Vancouver, Canada. [\[Return to Section\]](#section5) #### Suggested Citation Aloi, Giovanni. "Vegetal Realism: Toward an Ethical Engagement with Plant Life in Contemporary Art" in *Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World*, edited by Rachael Petersen, Russell Powell, and Natalia Scott Schwein. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026.