We think about this country as this melting pot, we're all here because some ancestor of ours decided to come here.

And with those migrations of humans, peopl also brought plants with them.

My name is Ginger Brooks Takahashi, I am an artist who is in the International.

This is going to be a garden.

It's going to be filled with many cultivars of Perilla frutescens which is a plant that's in the mint family.

And it's considered this irreplaceable flavo in Japanese and Korean cuisine.

All these garden beds here, they're woven out of willow.

They will be filled with soil.

And then in a couple of weeks, the plants are all going to go in.

visitors will be able to experience all these different physical characteristics and also the different flavors that perilla encompasses.

In the gallery there will be vitrines that have a series of these works on paper.

I started collecting these samples and drying them, and noticed that insects had made these little holes I started seeing faces in them.

And so then I started mimicking what the insects were doing.

so I started making eyes in the leaves.

And some of them are addition to these other existing holes.

So, so there starts to b these like faces that are kind of emerging This i Mugicha, which is a barley tea.

So one of the things I learned about with fragrances is that it's not just you want perilla.

So you put in perilla.

It's like it's an accord.

It's a combination of a lot of different scents that evoke that scent.

Part of the installation indoors will be a fragrance.

So I wanted to evoke kind of springtime and earth like that wet earth like, right a things are starting to emerge.

And so I included herbs that are emerging during that time.

I worke with a local clay artist, Alicia Dawn Young, and we each buil one of these vessels together.

This is the one that she made.

The one that I made is in the museum.

If you go visit it, you can smell the fragrance of the season.

What's been reall rewarding is to be able to work with all of these different practitioners to learn these new skills.

To learn willow weaving, to learn how to build a clay vessel.

to get a taste of this process.

It's been really incredible to work with all these new materials.

Perilla was an important plant for me growing up.

It felt like this ancestral tether, right?

It connected me to my Japanese ancestors.

As I grew up and started to understand that this plant was well loved in all these other countries, I started to understand how important this plant is.

It is considered an invasive species in most of the US.

I'm interested in connecting this larger question around xenophobia to the classification of invasive species.

So in addition to the garden, I'm making this companion installatio that will be in the galleries.

And I've created this series o works on paper that are texts.

so this is the paper that I made for this edition.

And it's made from perilla fibers and perilla leaves and seeds even.

took language that's used to talk about invasive species, and then language that's used to talk about migration and mix them together.

The perilla gives this green tone because abacas white.

was really exciting to make to make this paper.

It's very beautiful.

I grew up with gardens, and for me, the first kind of connection to the plant was through growing it and having it like outside of my family's home.

We moved a lot, but there was always a place for it, right?

So that experiential quality of being in relationship to a plant, to the textures of the leaf, to like how it smells and like learning how to prepare i and share it with other people is this very special experience that I wanted to share with other people.