Rong Lin
Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar
PhD Candidate: Mesoamerican art history
University of Illinois Chicago
Focusing on maize, maguey, and trees, Rong Lin's project examines different kinds of “vegetal bodies”: representations that blur the boundaries between human and plant forms, appearing in pictorial, sculptural, and textual sources. In this project, she explores the visual, material, and performative practices through which vegetal bodies were imagined, made, and enacted. Drawing on sixteenth-century Nahuatl sources, codices, and plant-based objects, her project aims to highlight how plants were not passive resources but relational entities capable of action, communication, and transformation.
