Zheming “Taro” Cai, a PhD candidate in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, has received the June and Simon K.C. Li Fellowship in East Asian Garden and Landscape Studies from The Huntington.

Founded in 1919, The Huntington is a cultural and educational institution in San Marino, CA, that supports research and public engagement through its library, art and botanical collections. Open to scholars at all career stages, the fellowship supports innovative research focused on East Asian gardens and landscapes

Cai is a designer and historian of landscape architecture. His research interests include garden history, the transnational production and circulation of landscape knowledge, and plant humanities. His dissertation, Chinese Landscape Architecture in Transnational Exchange, 1970s-2020s, examines the negotiation and professionalization of landscape knowledge and practice in China since the late Cold War.  

At the Huntington, Cai’s topic, Gardening in Chinese Arts: Techniques, Labor, and Embodied Knowledge in Premodern Landscape Representation, will investigate gardening as a technical practice and form of embodied knowledge in premodern China. Drawing on the Huntington’s collection of Chinese paintings, prints and horticultural treatises alongside its living gardens, his research asks how the secular labor of gardening was represented, transmitted, and encoded in the visual and textual sources. By foregrounding these marginalized practices and practitioners, the project develops new methodological approaches to Chinese garden history that move beyond literary and iconographic frameworks to engage with the material and tacit knowledge that shaped designed landscapes. In addition to pursuing his research during his year-long residency, Cai will contribute to the institution’s public programming and intellectual exchange.

“We are delighted to celebrate Taro’s great achievement in winning a postdoctoral fellowship at The Huntington, where he will prepare his fascinating dissertation on transnational exchange between China and the U.S., through ‘garden diplomacy,’ for publication,” said Claire Zimmerman, director of the ALD PhD program. “We further congratulate Taro, who will shortly defend his dissertation as one of the very first graduates of the ALD PhD.”