Root Emotions

Root Emotions by Miao Li explores the intricate root networks of urban forests, revealing the complex, hidden connections between underground ecosystems and city infrastructures. Urban trees often face limited root space, poor soil, and disconnection from the mycorrhizal networks that form the support for their resilience. Miao Li explores how this fragility mirrors the psychological disconnection of city dwellers from nature.

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The work invites viewers to connect with the unseen world beneath their feet. By overlapping forest and city, Li highlights shared forms and movements, showing how natural and artificial systems intertwine. Each installation embodies a hybrid landscape, reflecting both the stress and resilience of urban trees. Using lines as a central language, the works become three-dimensional sketches of exchange, transport, and migration, processes present in both root systems and cities. A root marked with reflective tape binds twigs and tiles, lamp wires twist into fibrous paper networks, and yarn inspired by mycelium weaves into internet cables and water pipes.

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Li combines plant materials, cultivated or gathered from around the world, with remnants of urban infrastructure.  With this combination, he reveals the vast underground entanglement that binds city and earth together. Root Emotions opens an imaginative space for future urban forests in the Symbiocene, where collaboration between city and nature forms the foundation for resilience. 

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