Media + Migration Lab

Spring 2026 Newsletter

IN FOCUS: Invasive Kin: Rooting With Our Plant Relatives

This season, the Media + Migration Lab turns its attention to the ground beneath our feet — to the plants that have crossed oceans, taken root in cracked pavements and forgotten lots, and persisted despite being labeled threats. Our current focus follows the research of Shenghan Gao, whose ongoing project Invasive Kin asks: what does it mean to be invasive? And who gets to decide?

The inquiry began with a moment of recognition. When Shenghan moved to New York and started foraging the city, she encountered mugwort growing wild along iron fences, behind dumpsters, and in the margins of parks. She knew this plant intimately — from childhood in China, from Dragon Boat Festival rituals, from the scent of healing baths. Yet here in New York, it was classified as invasive, a weed to be removed. That dissonance — between deep familiarity and official hostility — became the seed of this project.

Invasive Kin unfolds at the intersection of migration ecology, diasporic memory, and experimental media. It traces the entangled histories of plants and people marked as “out of place,” drawing connections between the logic of invasion ecology and the colonial structures that produced it. As Shenghan’s research has uncovered, many so-called invasive species — mugwort among them — arrived in North America as ballast flora aboard colonial trading ships, their seeds and soils carried across oceans by the same forces that moved enslaved and displaced people. The city’s waterfronts, built on that dumped ballast earth, are now thick with mugwort. To call for its removal is to erase the very history that brought it here.

Invasive Kin is a work of living relationship. Shenghan has been working directly with communities in New York who share their position in the margins with the invasive species. She has collaborated with foragers, herbalists, and community knowledge-bearers, and earlier this year hosted a Qingming mugwort foraging walk and a hands-on cooking demonstration workshop that brought together first- and second-generation immigrants to forage, cook, and share memories of plants from home. Almost everyone had a story: a parent who foraged when they first arrived, a grandmother’s remedy, a scent that carried through an entire childhood.

In parallel, Shenghan has been experimenting with cameraless, plant-based filmmaking techniques — including phytograms, in which mugwort presses directly onto film emulsion, leaving chemical traces of its own presence. The plant, in this way, becomes both subject and author. Each imprint carries the chemistry of the soil, the pollution, the rainwater of the site where it was foraged — transforming the filmstrip into a living archive of displacement and survival.

The project is growing into a multimedia documentary, Invasive Kin 同在异乡为异客, alongside a series of public programs and a community archive of drawings, speculative maps, cyanotypes, and documentary vignettes. At the Media + Migration Lab, we are documenting this research as it unfolds — collecting related artworks, datasets, and theoretical frameworks that share its questions. What grows where we are not supposed to be? What can these plants teach us about crossing borders, about thriving without permission, about rooting without owning the soil?

Look forward to her project that will published on the M2Lab site in the summer!
S.G.