Ginseng Knowledge Seekers' Luck

Guided tour in English with curator Mareile Flitsch in the exhibition "Dreaming of Ginseng"

Ginseng is a precious medicinal plant: since the Late Imperial Era (17th century to 1912), the plant, which grows hidden in the mountainous regions of north-east China, has been deeply inscribed into people's consciousness. Ginseng seekers from the poverty-stricken areas of northern China hoped to find wealth in the wilderness from the humanlike root, which often appeared to them in dreams.

The Manchurian artist Hou Yumei, born in 1952 in a village in north-east China, captures the stories and dreams of the ginseng seekers in papercuts. Her fine works of art deal with themes that are still relevant in the 21st century: honesty and betrayal, landscape conservation and species preservation. Today, ginseng has been tamed and is cultivated in plantations. Wild ginseng is under threat. And Hou Yumei now lives in San Francisco.

Hou Yumei's works came to Switzerland with Mareile Flitsch. During her research about the knowledge of ginseng seekers in the 1980s, she met the artist and brought some of her early works to the University of Zurich in 2008. What has happened to the ginseng dreams?