Kwan Queenie Li | Weeds: A Germinating Theory

Kwan Queeni Li, Weeds: A Germinating Theory, 2025.
Kwan Queeni Li, Weeds: A Germinating Theory, 2025.

For over a decade, artist and theorist Kwan Queenie Li (SMACT ’22) has been photographing weeds across the world. From Jerusalem to Shanghai, Varanasi to Athens, Cairo to Mexico City, she has trained her attention on these unintended but ubiquitous inhabitants of the contemporary urban sphere, finding them dwelling in corners and cracks, in spaces suspended between uses, in ruins and on construction sites.

This essay in image and text proposes a new view of cities that learns from the weed’s point of view, dissolving familiar categories and temporalities to see cities as evolving and often undefined spaces, replete with opportunity. Weeds organically defy phenomena that are taken for granted as immovable: walls, borders, history, and prescribed identities. They are registers of the real lives of cities – of disuse and neglect, but also freedom and porousness. Out-of-place by definition, they offer a new perspective on the idea of ‘place’ itself, and the ways it shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants.

 

[Book launch & happening]

Kwan Queenie Li: ‘Weeds’ at frogTOPIA open
[Book launch & happening]

Unit 10, Cattle Depot Artist Village, Hong Kong
Sunday, March 29, 2026 at 4pm

Join for a book launch & happening of Weeds: A Germinating Theory (MACK, 2025) with Kwan Queenie Li at frogTOPIA open, the studio of Frog King (Kwok Mang-ho), for an intergenerational intervention unfolding between two practices that blur the boundaries between art and the everyday. The gathering celebrates an artistic passion that embraces performativity and improvisation, and a shared commitment to living art as life.

As a pivotal figure in Hong Kong contemporary art, Frog King has inspired and astonished local and international audiences across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Echoing Ming Fay’s 1992 observation (quoted by Oscar Ho in 1998) that for Frog King, “everything coexists and the value structure lies on a floating scale, the artist leaps from one activity to another like a frog on lily pods in a pond”, the restless energy of the frog continues to ripple across these ponds today, animating new generations of artists.

For this book launch & happening, Li will install a series of weed photographs, subtly embedded and half-hidden within the dynamic environment of Frog King’s studio at Cattle Depot. Visitors are invited to wander through this living archive, tracing the interplay between Frog King’s exuberant visual universe and Li’s quieter, weed-like interventions.

The private view will also open space for young “kid-artists” to draw, engage, and respond directly to Frog King’s relentless imagery and Li’s weedy constellations, contributing to an ongoing collective happening within frogTOPIA open.

Limited editions of the book Weeds will be available for sale at the private view. The artist will donate her net royalty proceeds from this event to support the running of Frog King’s studio as a vital venue for art education and a significant living archive.

The site intervention at Cattle Depot runs through April 12, 2026.

Further Info & Contact: hello@lumospatium.org | kwanque@gmail.com

Frog and Weeds

“He often uses, as here, the image of the frog, its ever-changing life cycle symbolising perpetuity. Its double froggy eyes represent the cross-cultural bridge between Western and non-Western traditions with wide eyes open… sharing happiness and awareness.”

– Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings, 1986

In a similar vein, Li turns to weeds as an ever-surprising motif:

“Against orders and categories, weeds threaten an unruly, organic character. Squeezing through cracks in concrete and up through drains, their anonymous collectivity whispers of solidarity, agility, and vitality, evading domination both spatially and taxonomically.”

– Kwan Queenie Li, Weeds, 2025

Both frogs and weeds operate as symbols that trouble the line between inside and outside, centre and margin, offering inexhaustible pathways for artistic thinking and making. Whether in the form of amphibious tricksters or stubborn plants, they create thresholds for temporary communities: moments in which anyone might belong, linger, and look again – like a happily wind-greeting weed or a curiously hopping frog.

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