ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses depictions of rare flowers from Mount Huang, a famous cultural landmark in southern China, and various representations of the Chinese orchid (lan) in paintings and illustrations of materia medica, probing how flowers, grasses, and other plants shape their own formation as Wissensfiguren. It combines the approaches of Critical Plant Studies and of aesthetics of knowledge and argues that the qualities and properties of flowers, herbs, and vegetables produce the knowledge and symbolic uses that accreted around them. Through a cross-reading of visual and textual sources, it traces the entanglements of art and visual culture, local history, poetry, and medicine. The different forms of knowledge—botanical, visual, artistic, literary, historical, gender-related, somatic, dietetic, and pharmaceutical—that intersect in images of flowers can also serve as heuristic devices to think about interconnections and mutual elucidations between the different forms of knowledge that shape collections of art museums, ethnological collections, science museums, and libraries.
