Martin Butler

The Floating Gardens of Madam Wu takes its name from the floating settlements that lined the waterways of early nineteenth-century China—spaces untethered from land, nation, and law. Despite their poetic name, these gardens were anarchic worlds in motion: drifting architectures of survival where trade, pleasure, violence, and refuge coexisted. Outside legal jurisdiction, they became autonomous systems, generating their own economies and codes, invisible yet essential to the mainland they shadowed.

From within this unstable ecology emerged Ching Shih, raised among these floating communities and later known as the most powerful pirate of her time. Her story is not presented here as biography, but as transformation: a life shaped by precarity, mobility, and negotiation with power. The work imagines her rise as inseparable from the environment that formed her—an outlaw world where marginality became a source of agency, and disorder a condition for reinvention.

Seen through a contemporary lens, The Floating Gardens of Madam Wu, Butler in collaboration with I-Chen Zuffellato reads these histories as metaphors for cycles of decay and emergence. Images of fermentation, crushing, and bloom recur as quiet forces of change—what is discarded gathers potency, what is broken transforms. Like plums fallen to the ground, these submerged histories continue to work beneath the surface, generating futures that exceed their origins. “Plums, thrown on the ground. Crushed. They too will ferment, blossom and bloom”.