The Scent of Minnan: Plant Art, Memory, and a Living Sense of Place
For Xiaowei Zhang, plants have never been silent objects.
They carry the salt of the coast, the dampness of the southern air, the rhythm of the monsoon, and the memories of generations who learned to read the land through scent, texture, and season.
Born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, Zhang is the creative director of CAOER, a plant-environment design studio, and a professor of traditional Chinese floral art. Her relationship with plants is rooted in a family history that spans four generations of horticultural practice.
Her work moves between landscape, installation, floral art, cultural research, and spatial design. Yet its central question remains intimate: how can plants help us understand the places we come from?
CAOER: Creating Space with Plants
Founded in China and jointly directed by two fourth-generation sisters, CAOER is a plant-environment design brand dedicated to bringing emotional depth, cultural memory, and quiet vitality into interior spaces.
The name represents more than a studio. It describes a way of seeing.
At CAOER, a plant is not treated as a finishing touch placed beside a sofa or beneath a window. It is understood as a living presence—one that alters the atmosphere of a room, responds to time, and develops a relationship with the people around it.
Through carefully composed botanical environments, CAOER gives plants a more nuanced identity. Form, fragrance, movement, shadow, material, and cultural symbolism are considered together.
The result is not simply decoration. It is a form of spatial companionship.
A branch leaning toward daylight, a cluster of leaves shifting with the air, or the seasonal appearance of a blossom can subtly change how a room is experienced. Plant life introduces a different measure of time—slower, more attentive, and more closely connected to natural cycles.
CAOER describes this relationship as one of co-creation. The plant does not merely occupy the space. It participates in shaping daily life.
From Ornament to Living Presence
Contemporary interiors often reduce plants to visual accessories. They are selected for color, scale, or convenience, then arranged to complete a composition.
CAOER works from another premise.
A plant carries its own history. It belongs to a climate, a terrain, and often a cultural system of meaning. Its value lies not only in how it looks, but in what it remembers and how it lives.
This approach draws from Zhang’s upbringing in a horticultural family. Across four generations, plant knowledge was not separated into formal categories such as gardening, design, ritual, or domestic life. It was learned through repetition: tending, observing, pruning, arranging, waiting.
Such knowledge is physical as much as intellectual.
It lives in the hand that knows where to cut a stem, the eye that recognizes a change in the weather, and the memory that connects a fragrance with a season, a festival, or a childhood home.
CAOER brings this inherited sensitivity into contemporary spaces, allowing botanical design to become a medium for cultural continuity.
“The Scent of Minnan”: A Plant Art Exhibition
“The Scent of Minnan” is a plant art exhibition that examines the botanical culture of southern Fujian through landscape, memory, ritual, and sensory experience.
Minnan—the cultural region of southern Fujian—is shaped by mountains and sea.
Humidity, salt, monsoon winds, and subtropical heat influence the forms of local plant life. They also influence architecture, food, labor, ceremony, and the ways in which people organize their days.
Within this environment, plants have never existed as isolated natural specimens. They have moved through nearly every aspect of life.
They appear in kitchens and courtyards, in herbal traditions and seasonal customs, in ancestral offerings and temple rituals. They help people recognize changes in weather, mark the passage of time, and maintain a practical relationship with the land.
In this sense, the plant is both material and messenger.
Plant Knowledge as Sensory Knowledge
The botanical experience of Minnan can be understood as a form of sensory knowledge.
It is learned through smell, touch, taste, and repeated physical contact. It is also preserved through collective memory, passed between family members and across communities without always being formally recorded.
A fragrance may indicate the arrival of a season.
The texture of a leaf may suggest how it can be used.
A flower may belong to a religious ceremony, while an herb may carry domestic, medicinal, or symbolic importance.
These forms of understanding are often quiet. They are embedded in ordinary habits rather than presented as formal doctrine.
Yet together they form a sophisticated local intelligence: a way of living that responds closely to climate, ecology, and inherited belief.
“The Scent of Minnan” gives visual and spatial form to this knowledge. Through plant specimens, household objects, archival references, and contemporary artistic expression, the exhibition reveals how botanical life participates in the construction of regional identity.
Fragrance as a Cultural Language
Scent is usually described as something fleeting. It appears, moves through the air, and disappears.
In the exhibition, however, fragrance becomes a cultural language.
It travels between the body and the land. It recalls spaces that may no longer exist and people who may no longer be present. It can hold the atmosphere of a courtyard after rain, the smoke of a temple, the sharpness of medicinal leaves, or the sweetness of flowers used during a festival.
Fragrance is therefore not merely a physical property of a plant. It is a vessel for memory.
From the everyday use of herbs and branches to ceremonial traditions associated with flower deities, plants help construct the spiritual landscape of Minnan.
Within that landscape, life, rest, and breath are not treated as separate ideas. They overlap, forming a rhythm in which human existence remains closely tied to the natural world.
To breathe is to receive the atmosphere of a place.
To rest is to return to its tempo.
To live is to participate in its cycles.
Between Botanical Archive and Contemporary Art
“The Scent of Minnan” does not attempt to recreate the past as a fixed image. Instead, it places inherited objects and botanical materials in conversation with contemporary artistic practice.
This approach allows the exhibition to move between documentation and interpretation.
Plant specimens offer evidence of local ecology. Domestic objects reveal how vegetation entered daily life. Artistic installations open a more emotional space, where memory, absence, and imagination can coexist.
The exhibition asks visitors to look beyond conventional distinctions between nature and culture.
Plants are not merely the background to human history. They actively shape behavior, ritual, language, and perception. At the same time, human communities cultivate, classify, transport, and assign meaning to them.
The relationship is reciprocal.
Each transforms the other.
Returning to the Land Through the Senses
At its heart, “The Scent of Minnan” is an exhibition about return.
Not a literal return to an untouched homeland, but a return through the senses—to the fragments of place that remain within the body.
A familiar scent can cross years in an instant. A dried leaf can recall a landscape. A vessel can preserve the memory of how plants were gathered, arranged, offered, or shared.
Through these details, the exhibition reconstructs a connection between personal experience and collective history.
It encourages visitors to consider how identity is shaped not only by language and ancestry, but by weather, soil, fragrance, and repeated contact with living things.
A Botanical Practice Rooted in Continuity
Xiaowei Zhang’s work with CAOER reflects this same movement between inheritance and renewal.
Her family’s horticultural tradition provides a foundation, but not a boundary. Rather than reproducing established forms, she brings botanical knowledge into contemporary interiors, exhibitions, and cultural conversations.
The work remains rooted in Minnan while speaking to a wider audience.
For collectors, designers, and viewers outside China, CAOER offers an alternative understanding of botanical art. Plants are not selected solely for visual harmony. They are approached as carriers of time, belief, and regional knowledge.
A botanical environment can therefore become something more than beautiful.
It can become a portrait of a place.
Carrying the Scent Forward
“The Scent of Minnan” follows plants across domestic, spiritual, and artistic life. It reveals how they connect the everyday with the sacred, the individual with the community, and the present with inherited memory.
The exhibition also recognizes that people and plants are both shaped by movement.
Seeds travel. Families migrate. Traditions adapt. Fragrances return unexpectedly in unfamiliar places.
To carry the scent of Minnan is not simply to preserve a regional past. It is to allow that past to remain alive—changing form as it enters new rooms, new cities, and new stages of life.
Through CAOER, Xiaowei Zhang creates spaces where this continuity can be felt.
The plant is no longer an ornament.
It becomes a companion, an archive, and a living thread between the body and the land.
