Searching for ginseng in the mountains of north-east China: artist Hou Yumei immortalizes stories about the precious plant in silhouettes.

Ginseng as a precious medicinal plant: since the late imperial era (17th century to 1912), the plant, which grows hidden in the mountainous regions of north-eastern China, has been deeply engraved in people's consciousness. Ginseng seekers from the poverty-stricken areas of northern China hoped to find wealth in the wilderness from the human-looking root, which often appeared to them in dreams.

The Manchurian artist Hou Yumei, born in 1952 in a village in north-east China, captures the stories and dreams of the ginseng seekers in silhouettes. Her fine works of art deal with themes that are still relevant in the 21st century: Honesty and betrayal, landscape conservation and species preservation. Today, ginseng has been tamed and is cultivated in plantations. Wild ginseng is under threat. And Hou Yumei now lives in San Francisco.

The works of Hou Yumei came to Switzerland with Mareile Flitsch. During her research into the knowledge of ginseng seekers in the 1980s, she met the artist and brought some of her early works to the University of Zurich in 2008. What happened to the ginseng dreams?


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.