“I believe that instead of having sculptures of ancient figures in public parks, we should be making giant sculptures of flowers and seed pods, and be getting people excited about life, about nature and living things, instead of ancient history. People don’t really interact with or respond to those old monuments anymore.”—Sopheap Pich 

This fall, Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich traveled to New York to oversee the overnight installation of his new High Line Commission, a series of three copper mesh sculptures inspired by the seedpods of Cambodia’s iconic yet endangered rosewood trees. Standing tall along the Meadow Walk at 24th Street, the winged figures of Kânh Chhrôôl (Gluta Usitata), Melembu, and Khlông (Dipterocarpus Tuberculatus) take on devotional poses, paying homage to nature’s endurance and beauty while calling attention to its vulnerability to human forces. Surrounded by Russian sage and Parker’s Variety fern-leaf yarrow, the sculptures resonate deeply with the surrounding plant life. This intersection of art and horticulture became the starting point for a conversation between Pich and Richard Hayden, the High Line’s Senior Director of Horticulture.

Richard Hayden: I’m fascinated by the story of how the seedpods of Cambodia’s hardwood trees inspired your commission. But before we get to that, how did you come to work with botanical forms?

Sopheap Pich: My first botanical sculpture was the morning glory flower, which is now with the Guggenheim. Sculpture was quite new to me at that time because I thought of myself as a painter. I believed painting was the highest form of art, and was the best way to express the essential emotion that I wanted people to experience from my work. Over time, I learned that if you make a sculpture a certain way, it will convey that same essential emotion. However, my connection to nature goes back to being an art student and being instructed by my professor to draw nature and learn from nature. It is very complex and difficult, but once you accept that and immerse yourself, you realize that nature registers in your body. You’re not painting from memory or imagination; you’re duplicating something real that your brain recognizes because it is in your body.

Richard: I’m struck by two things that you said. One was hoping that people who see it will have an emotional reaction. And this idea that you’re interpreting nature, but you’re not recreating it, right? Those are also tenets of our garden designer, Piet Oudolf, who designed the plantings. He always says that the High Line gardens are his interpretation of nature—they’re not nature itself. They’re also designed in an episodic way, to hopefully evoke an emotional experience that connects to something from our childhood or our past, a moment in nature that we can recall and feel again. Is there a sense, when you’re making these seedpods, of how precise they are compared to the actual seeds? Are you taking some interpretation with them?

Sopheap: I collect many different seedpods, and each one is slightly different. Nature dictates how they become, how the wings bend or twist, so I take small details from each and build a form that feels right. When you see it, I want you to feel something, to fall a little in love with it. When I draw, I’m inspired by things like a seashell or a scallop shell. You see the lines, the color, the edge of each ridge. It’s not something you draw with a perfect pen line; it’s more like using a rough pencil, where the edge itself creates a sensation. The edge really matters to me; it’s often the first thing that communicates emotion. Even a single line can move you. It’s like music played through an amplifier instead of a computer—there’s an edge, a kind of friction, something raw.

When I started working with sculpture, I discovered something new about making art. Sculpture allowed me to work through feeling rather than frustration; everything just flowed. Later, when I began working with rosewood seedpods, I thought about how enormous the trees are in Cambodia; their trunks are wide like California redwoods. If a single tree can be that vast, why not make its seed just as monumental? I wanted to turn something tiny into something absurdly big—large enough to fill a shipping container. It became an experiment in scale and material, making the biggest sculpture possible out of the smallest seed, using the most humble material. But when you’re making sculpture out of natural materials, you’re worried about it falling apart or losing its shape, or decomposing, or being eaten by bugs. So, we learned about preservation. We learned how thin bamboo can be, how small bamboo can be, and how big this little bamboo can be. This form that also sits on the floor without bulging, without losing its shape. That was really quite something else.

When I moved from bamboo to metal, I wanted to keep that same feeling. I had worked with a foundry before, but they made solid forms that didn’t feel right. I prefer open structures that breathe. So my studio started doing it ourselves. We treated the metal the same way we treat bamboo, just with more heat and more care. Whether it’s bamboo or copper, it’s still about following the line and letting it lead you. I call it “taking a line for a walk.” The line moves, and then you weld it together. It’s a kind of weaving. You make one point meet another and tie them together. In the end, it’s always nature that dictates the form, and my job is simply to listen.

Richard: Why are Cambodian rosewood tree seed pods such an inspiration to you? 

Sopheap: About ten years ago, I acquired a beautiful piece of land in the mountains that the sellers let me pay for with my sculptures. My trees started to disappear, and I discovered my neighbors were cutting them down. Cambodia is a very poor country, and they were cutting down my trees to sell the wood so they could feed their children. I’m not going to say that’s the wrong thing to do because I don’t know how to help them. These are desperate people, and I didn’t want to punish them any further. I also couldn’t stop them. So I would take pictures of my trees cut down or fallen over a trail, and it would pain my heart. In my acceptance of not being able to save my trees, I thought that I could at least shed light on how beautiful and significant they are.

I am also saying through these sculptures that I am from Cambodia, I am a human being, I love nature, and so should you. I’m not hitting people on the head with a hammer to say, stop cutting down trees. I’m saying, let’s celebrate trees. And, to celebrate a tree, you have to know what it looks like, appreciate what it smells like, understand that it has a seed and flowers. In Cambodia, most people will see a plank of rosewood or a table, but they’ve never seen the tree in nature. So the specificity of plants is also an essential part of appreciating nature—not just the idea of nature, but understanding the actual nature itself. So making sculptures of seed pods or flowers is my way of celebrating them.

I’m Cambodian, I love wood. My house is made of wood. I’m not anti-logging. I don’t have a problem with people cutting down trees because we’re a poor country, and we don’t have industry to lift people out of poverty. I just want us to replace the trees. We also only have 14.5 million people. We have a lot of land, more land than people need, so let’s plant more trees.

Richard: All seeds have a dispersal mechanism, but the winged shape of the rosewood seedpod is particularly fascinating, as it allows the seed to ‘fly’ far from the mother tree before replanting itself in the ground. Yet despite this incredibly efficient mechanism for propagation, these trees can’t keep up with the poaching due to the demand for and value of their wood, and you’ve chosen to celebrate these majestic trees through the form of their seed pods. There’s also something profound about the promise that exists in a seed—the idea that within something so small lies the potential for an enormous tree. Is that sense of possibility something you think about in your work?

Sopheap: These seed pods have wings; they are built for travel. They are also from Cambodia and came to the United States. The series of sculptures on the High Line began as a proposal for the High Line Plinth, which exhibits monumental works, so originally it was just one very large seedpod. I wanted to have this “alien” seed come crashing into New York City. When it turned out that the commission would be for another location on the High Line, I decided to make them smaller, and if I made them smaller, I chose to make multiple that were different but from the same colony.

For me, making these sculptures is a way of honoring that full life—the beauty, the fragility, and the promise within it. I’m not trying to be political or environmental. I’m just an artist. I’m not trying to consciously make a narrative. I try to tread lightly but powerfully. I hope for soft power—that people will see the sculptures and be moved.