The Hanging Garden

Artist Ho Tam made The Hanging Garden in 2022. It is an inkjet print on paper, measuring 33 centimetres wide by 
48 centimeters high.The story that Ho Tam created for this artwork centres on a mythical garden that hangs in the sky. 
People believe it is a gift from the gods and send their purest youths to tend it.This is a horizontal image of a set of four 
concentric circles of flowers with an astronaut at their centre. 

The viewer sees the flower rings as if standing in the middle of a round tunnel. The rings are identical but shrink visibly as they 
recede into the distance. The outside ring is partially cut off by the frame of the image, giving the sense there are more rings 
behind the viewer. Each ring is assembled of four identical sets of flowers. There are five different flowers chained together in 
each set, always in the same order. Because the rings are identical, the types of flowers align, creating rays of colour that appear 
to radiate outwards. The strongest lines are aligned with the corners of the paper, drawing the eye from the outside of the frame
to the very centre. An astronaut is in the middle of the smallest, most distant ring—the very centre of the composition. The astronaut 
is wearing a full space suit with a Canadian flag on one shoulder. They are facing the viewer but rotated nearly upside down. Aligned 
along one of the radiating rows of flowers, the astronaut’s head points to the lower left corner. The body language and the nearly 
upside-down position of the astronaut enhance the sense that they are floating in space, possibly rotating.

The artist created this story by mixing and matching bank note images. This artwork invites us to reflect on how nations are built 
around their founding stories and myths, the base of a shared identity. Do you feel the images on Canadian notes represent myth or history?