Lily Kwong Redefines Urban Living and Food Availability
By Stephanie Gao
Where can green spaces in cities be found? Parks, being the most obvious and common answer, allowing not much else to come to mind.
Enter Lily Kwong, a self-proclaimed urban edenist, landscape artist, and founder of Studio Lily Kwong—a landscape design firm founded with the mission of reconnecting people to nature.
Based in New York, the firm’s designs span America’s East and West Coasts, from the Glossier Seattle pop-up to a site-specific botanical installation in the bustling Grand Central Station.
Using plants as a design medium, Kwong believes it is essential for her as a young Chinese-American woman to “create more compassionate, equitable, and balanced places for us to live in” and bring “a new sense of space into the world.” In her own words, “if we change the way our cities are built, we can change who we are.”
Working in partnership with Maison St-Germain in June 2017, Kwong transformed a portion of the New York City High Line into an immersive, multidimensional experience. Guests were free to roam among green wall mazes arranged in the fashion of a 16th-century French labyrinth and a hanging installation of flowers modelled after rolling hills. Amongst the disorienting combination of blooms and neon lights, a modern dance performance by Mafalda Millies takes on a new life when coupled with St-Germain’s plant-based cocktails. Kwong notes that every design element—from the 13,000 carefully curated flowers to how the plant life would be recycled after the event—is meant to delight and inspire an awe for nature in celebration of the summer solstice. Kwong’s attention to the value of plants and their ecological impact is evident in all of her installations, as she always makes the conscious effort to steer away from plants that don’t support the native fauna in the area.
As a former model and cousin of designer Joseph Altuzarra, Kwong’s unique connection to fashion means she pays special attention to the materials, touch, feel, and energy of the space she is designing for. For her High Line installation, she walked through the High Line multiple times to get a feeling of how a visitor would move through the space, adjusting her design to prioritize the rhythms and paces of real human life.
During the height of the COVID pandemic in April, Kwong’s studio launched the Freedom Garden Initiative to address the issue of food insecurity in America. Kwong looked to history for inspiration, referencing the “Victory Gardens” that appeared during the 1918 influenza pandemic and continued during World War II. Vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens were planted in backyards, empty lots, and rooftops across cities, and from these 20 million gardens, an estimated 40% of the country’s fresh vegetables was produced in the early 1940s.
Kwong’s initiative re-purposed the original movement, doing away with the racist history of “Victory Gardens” and choosing to focusing instead on “freedom from a centralized food system, freedom from illness (both societal and physical), and freedom to reconnect with the land and ourselves.” Using social media as her primary tool of dissemination, the @freedom_gardens Instagram account as amassed nearly 7,000 followers and demonstrates how the community gardening initiative is picking up pace in the lockdown urban sphere. In the future, Kwong hopes to connect with local leaders and policymakers to make community gardens a normalcy in cities, though Kwong stresses the inclusivity of the initiative (a little pot and some soil, or even just water, is all you need!) and how her team is dedicated to “demystify” urban farming.
For those of you out there just starting your own gardens, www.freedom- gardens.com/ offers paid online lessons and consultations to those who need advice. 100% of proceeds are donated to Black-owned farms and organisations fighting for justice in the American food system. To Lily Kwong, humanity’s love for flowers is built into our DNA and having green spaces in our lives is a necessity. From inspiring better health, to enhancing a sense of belonging, and okay, increasing real estate values, the vital nature of greenery in urban centres is something Kwong continues to advocate for in not just her designs and projects, but also in her day to daylife.