Forest of Lost Trees

Like photographs, trees transcribe memory. Their bodies are histories of earth, sky and society, filling the shapes afforded to them by soil, light and human intervention. The tree is held taut between biological time and the time of human consciousness.

This tension animates two recently published, independently produced monographs from Hatje Cantz that investigate society through images of displaced trees. In Forest, Chinese-British photographer Yan Wang Preston photographs trees that have been transplanted, sometimes violently, as part of China’s drive toward urbanization. In Jeju Island, the locale of which sits two-thousand kilometers to the east of Preston’s subjects, Korean photographer Oksun Kim looks closely at the arboreal equivalent of thirdculture kids: misfit palm trees, raised far from their ancestral homes.

In Preston’s , we see the outcome of a China that