Peonies

This watercolour painting was created by Lu Xu and depicts five pink-coloured peonies. It is complemented by a painting of two stalks of bamboo created by her daughter, Grace Ko, also part of Te Papa’s collection. The two artworks, and another by their painting teacher, Tina Lin, were donated to the museum in connection with the museum’s Asian mental health project in 2022.

Both Lu and Grace have shared a love of Chinese watercolour painting ever since Lu took her daughter to her first Chinese painting class at the age of seven. Grace feels that their contrasting artistic strengths mirror their differing personal strengths.

"Mum's [signature plant] was the Peony; a flower that required intricate twists of the brush and well throughout floral construction. They're also known to symbolise beauty and healing. Mine was the Bamboo; a plant that required one seamless stroke and confident precision.

You can't overthink the Bamboo, the certainty of the brush translates to the beauty of the plant. They're known to symbolise strength and growth...when I think about mine and mum's paintings, a lot about our fears and ambitions come to mind.

Mum thought about things a lot. About her relationship with her mother, how she didn't want to project her fears onto me, how she wanted to intricately curate a well-rounded childhood for me. Every thought of hers, was like every fragile petal off the Peony. Whereas I didn't overthink, at least when I was young, I could be present and grounded in the stroke and not think about the next. Like how I trust in the process of my healing and lean into the growth I experience – because of the intentional childhood my mother gifted me. The thinking and planning that one does when painting a Peony, comes when the brush is hitting the page, whilst the thinking and planning that one does when painting bamboo, comes before the brush touches the paper.”

Grace also sees parallels between the dualistic relationship between the peony and bamboo, and her relationship with her mother:

"Although the two plants are at each side of the spectrum, they're usually painted together to show the yin and yan[g] in the artform; a motif that Chinese mother and daughters share. The notion that no matter how painful the relationship can be due to childhood emotional enmeshment in Chinese families, the pair are still drawn together and share great chemistry."

Grace grew up in Pōneke/Wellington with her Chinese mother and Taiwanese father. Her relationship with her parents, and particularly her mother, has been central to her personal mental health journey – this is detailed in her article ‘4-days-as-me’ in the zine Unravelling Threads: Asian mental health (Te Papa, 2022).