Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

About the Talk

In Chinese bird and flower markets, totally different plants may have an identical name, such as “Golden Fortune”. Different from botanists’ scientific classification of plants, people use these auspicious names to convey their wishes for better life and beautiful imaginations about nature. This has inspired the artist Lin Tianmiao to create My Garden, an artwork that is included in her exhibition “Systems” and now displayed on the fourth floor of the Rockbund Art Museum.

To avoid confusion arising from multiple names given to the same plant or identical names given to different plants, botanists attempted to categorize plants based on the flower colors, leaf shapes or other features of plants. In the eighteenth century, the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné established a system of taxonomy based on the number of plants’ reproduction organs, which has been widely used till now. This seemingly objective system built by referring to the relationships among human beings was inevitably influenced by the social and cultural factors in the botanist’s era.

We are honored to invite the botanist Shi Jun to introduce and compare the different systems and methods of naming plants as well as their origins and background stories in this talk. He will also share his own observations and thoughts about culture and society from the perspective of a botanist.

本次“林天苗：体•统”展览中，位于四楼的作品《我的花园》灵感来源于艺术家的一个发现：在中国的花鸟市场里，几种完全不同的植物可能都有同样的一个名字，如“金玉满堂”。与植物学家们严谨的分类方式不同，人们往往将自己对生活的愿望和对自然的想像投射在植物的名字上。

为了解决同物异名和同名异物的问题，植物学家曾尝试用花的颜色或叶的形状等特征来为植物分类。但是到了18世纪，瑞典博物学家林奈决定按照繁殖器官的数目为植物确立秩序，普及了至今仍在使用的植物命名法。这种借助人类之间的关系构建起来的看似客观的体系模型，其实也带有植物学家所在的时代背景以及文化因素的影响。

本次讲座我们邀请到了植物学家史军来给公众讲解、比较植物的各种不同命名体系和命名方式的由来。史军将与公众分享植物命名背后的故事，并从植物学出发，延伸出他对人文、社会的观察和思考。

Shi Jun is the founder of Corn Science Lab, the Council Member of Orchid Society of China and member of China Science Writers Association. He once served as a planner for Guokr Reading Program and an associate editor for the magazine Newton. He obtained a PhD in Botany at Institute of Botany, the Chines Academy of Sciences, specializing in research on propagation and protection of the Orchidaceae.

He is the author of Plants Universe and Botanists’ Chopsticks and Test Strips, a book about how to distinguish between edible plants and poisonous plants. A “super topic” about botany launched by him at Sina Weibo has attracted more than 100 million views.