Subterrestrial, Lily Kwong’s latest installation, invites viewers into a subterranean garden of layered textures, organic alchemy, and the quiet resilience of Southern California’s native flora. Marking Kwong's debut collaboration with Night Gallery and her return to Los Angeles since 2017, this installation will be in full bloom from now through Summer 2025. Alongside Subterrestrial, Kwong unveils Solis, a series of lumen prints that echo her journey into motherhood, available in the Chapel Viewing Room until December 7, 2024. Both projects cultivate a nuanced interplay between control and surrender, where light, weather, and seasonal rhythms shape each work, fostering an intimate dialogue with the region’s distinct ecological tapestry.

Rooted in a practice that blossoms at the crossroads of contemporary art, botanical design, climate mindfulness, and wellness, Kwong’s work bridges the natural and urban realms, urging a reconnection to the earth through sensory, transformative installations. Her previous presentations at Night Gallery, along with public works like her renowned installations at Madison Square Park and The New York Botanical Garden, demonstrate her commitment to public art that merges botany and community spaces, weaving nature into the fabric of everyday life.

For Subterrestrial, Kwong draws from Hügelkultur, an ancient permaculture technique that fosters sustainable, self-watering beds of nutrient-rich soil by layering decaying wood and other organic materials. Her installation — an 18-foot mound rising nearly six feet — blooms with native grasses, trees, and flowers, creating a living sanctuary within the concrete jungle of downtown Los Angeles. As seasons shift, so too will Subterrestrial, gradually revealing the often-overlooked life that pulses beneath the city’s industrial sprawl, meditating on resilience, decay, and regrowth.

In Solis, Kwong utilizes a nineteenth-century solar photogram process to create a series of lumen prints inspired by her own motherhood. This body of work captures native plants foraged from her garden and the wilds of the Santa Monica mountains, imprinted on expired photographic paper with gold, salt, and other elemental fixatives. The result is a series of ephemeral, sun-kissed botanicals that memorialize her deep respect for nature’s cycles. To explore both works further, we spoke with Kwong about how she celebrates the themes of renewal and impermanence, extending her lyrical commitment to sustainable art and deep reverence for the enduring beauty of the earth.

Your work is heavily inspired by Hügelkultur, an ancient permaculture technique. What initially drew you to this method, and how do you see its principles of layering and natural decay resonating with the themes of urban resilience?

For Subterrestrial, I wanted this piece to center both community and ecology. The Hügel was the perfect technique to capture both expansive provocations in one contained form. Hügelkultur is a permaculture practice where a mound constructed from decaying wood debris, compostable biomass and waste materials creates an environment that improves soil fertility and warming, water retention, and benefits the plants that grow there. I loved the vision of creating a vibrant, interconnected plant community that not only brought diverse materials together, but offered a place of experimentation for a more sustainable future. By working with only indigenous plants and seeds, as well as using the de-paved concrete as part of our core building materials, Subterrestrial is the product of a dream, a vision, a plea for an urban future that strikes a more harmonious balance with the natural world and all her wisdom and beauty. The structure of the Hügel itself contains a roadmap for how we may create a more resilient urban community — re-integration of age-old traditions, valuing existing resources, and mutual care. 

Subterrestrial speaks to the often “overlooked life” beneath LA, bringing elements of a Southern California garden into a bustling urban gallery space. What challenges did you face in cultivating a native habitat within such an industrial environment, and how do you hope visitors will interpret this coexistence of concrete and flora?

I am truly in awe of how much labor this piece required. It took an extraordinary effort for our team to depave just an 18’ diameter circle of asphalt, taking two entire days to just create the footprint of the piece. When we finally hit permeable soil and gave her a drink of water for the first time in years, we all got quite emotional. It’s staggering to think about how much of our earth has been sealed up with toxic asphalt, cut off from sun, wind, water — all the elements that make our planet alive. With Los Angeles’ 28,000 lane miles of paved streets that make it the largest municipal system in the United States, it felt like a small but vital act of resistance to liberate this small patch of soil and return her to an imagined original state. I hope when visitors see this organic form emerging from the pavement, eventually teeming with life, it connects them to who we once were, and who we might become as earth-based humans. 

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Many of your works, including this latest installation, engage with the cycles of nature — growth, decay, and regrowth. How has motherhood influenced your perception of these natural cycles, particularly as reflected in Solis?

Connecting to the Life/Death/Life cycle of the natural world has been one of the greatest teachings for me as a result of working with plant life. In nature, decay becomes the fertile ground for new life. This wisdom helped prepare me for the ultimate Life/Death/Life cycle that is new motherhood. This new life erupts from you and brings so much joy and love, but the death of who you were as a woman pre-motherhood is so painful, so liberating and so unprecedented. What emerged for me is an entirely new creative practice. I started exploring solar photograms towards the end of my maternity leave because it was something I could create with my infant daughter by my side, and it offered an avenue to express all these mysterious, numinous emotions that I was experiencing and didn’t have language for. Solis is a product of the new life cycle that followed the ego-death that new motherhood offers, with the medium itself providing a way to explore the notion of chance vs. control, incubation and the alchemizing elements that make us who we are. 

Your installations encourage a multi-sensory engagement with nature. How do you picture people experiencing touch, smell, and sound within this? Are there elements you’ve designed specifically to heighten these sensory experiences?

There are over 25 cubic feet of soil that make up Subterrestrial and the smell of earth in contrast to industrial downtown LA is undeniable. It will be the first thing visitors smell when they walk into Night Gallery, and as the sages and other native plants start to bloom and bolt the air will be filled with the aromas of our Southern California landscape. We seeded the mound with hundreds of wildflowers — clarkia, poppies, coreopsis, lupine, heliotrope. When they germinate and bloom, it will be a feast for the eyes and the senses and we designed the plant palette with an eye toward color, texture and shape. We included lots of grasses both for their beautiful form, but also for the rustling sounds they will co-create with the wind. 

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Given that Subterrestrial will evolve with the seasons until Summer 2025, how do you anticipate this piece changing over time? Is there a particular season you’re most excited to see come to life within this living installation?

The prime time to plant wildflower seeds in LA is November, so for the opening we seeded the mound with a native superbloom mix. While the piece appears primarily as simply bare earth, really it is teeming with potential life. With the rains and cooler temperatures ahead, I anticipate Subterrestrial being in full bloom by March and we plan to host programming events around the Spring Solstice. All seasons will offer different vistas — from its current raw state, to a Spring feast of color and growth, to a retreat and dormancy period in the late summer / early fall. Again, this piece is about the Life/Death/Life cycle that underwrites our lives and landscapes, and there is beauty and a loss in every stage. 

In the context of LA, a city often associated with rapid development and urbanization, how do you hope Subterrestrial serves as a commentary on sustainability and the importance of connecting with native flora?

Subterrestrial asks how we make ecology an integral part of our urban landscapes and urban lives. It re-centers the land, even in the epicenter of industrial modernity. We are currently designing the world towards death — stripping our planet of biodiversity, draining our soil of its vitality, and cutting ourselves off from its surface. This piece celebrates the potential life underneath the pavement, and is a reminder that even in the most industrial spaces, new life can thrive. 

What is your current favorite flora at the moment?

Matilija poppies — I love their gorgeous, egg-yolky centers and crepe paper, and their fantastic scale. I even have a piece in Solis dedicated to them, “Matilija Poppies in the Late Summer.” Ecologically they are known as ‘fire followers’ because their seeds germinate after chemicals in smoke and fire leach into the soil. It gives me hope that something so beautiful and strong can emerge after the earth is scorched — a totem for us now more than ever.