City Planting

Artist Ho Tam made City Planting in 2022. It is an inkjet print on paper, measuring 33 centimetres wide by 48 
centimeters high. In Ho Tam’s story, a city is created by people building homes and community—together. 
But they soon lose sight of what matters, and greed takes over.

City Planting is a colourful, vertical collage of big, significant buildings stacked brick-like upon the unfinished 
walls of two modest houses. Filling the bottom quarter of the frame is the foundation to the collage—a pair 
of simple houses of bricks being hand-built by a number of Black men. So far there are only stone foundations 
and partially finished brick walls held in place by wooden supports. It appears to be a community project, and 
the men are not dressed like construction workers. 

Sixteen monumental buildings and other structures are stacked on top of this foundation. They vary greatly in size, 
scale, colour, style, culture and era. Office buildings, a bridge, parliament buildings, a cathedral, palaces and temples rise 
stacked in layers of interlocked forms. There is no order to their arrangement which ends two-thirds up the print in a jagged 
horizon line of towers, steeples and peaked roofs. Three structures are stacked on top of one another up the middle, forming 
a broad, vertical line. They are a mansion with tall columns, a monumental arch and a narrow skyscraper that rises high 
above the centre of the horizon, forming a pinnacle or spire to the whole composition.

Buildings and monuments are commonly seen on bank notes—representing a society’s achievements and reflecting its 
priorities. What might each say about a country’s values?