Peng JiaHao was born in 1994 in Wenling, Zhejiang Province, China. He lives and works in Los Angeles. A botanical artist, he has developed a multidisciplinary practice that brings together living sculpture, photography and site-specific installation. His works function as living ecosystems, tracing cycles of growth, decay and quiet resilience.

Nothing, however, pointed him toward art. In China, he studied environment and equipment engineering, designing gas pipelines and air-conditioning systems for buildings. His greatest joys at the time were photography and botanical gardens. He moved to the United States at 22 and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) in 2019. In 2018, he took part in Dust: The Plates of the Present, a collaborative photographic project acquired by the Centre Pompidou.

From photography to living plants

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, he left the Midwest for Southern California. He kept an intimate photographic diary, Best By, published by C41 Magazine in 2021. The Californian climate, springlike all year round, opened his eyes to a profusion of plants and greenhouses. Plants became his medium. For him, photography and plants speak of the same thing: light, captured by the camera and transformed by the plant through photosynthesis. In 2023, he founded tenpopo, a plant and floral design studio in Los Angeles. The following year, he presented the installation Hollywood Aquarium Store at [ROOM], the project space of Make Room gallery.

A philosophy rooted in Mount Tiantai

His work is rooted in his home region, that of Mount Tiantai, birthplace of the Buddhist school of the same name. This school deeply shaped Japanese floral art, including ikebana. From it, Peng JiaHao draws the idea that every flower holds both its fleeting beauty and its disappearance. His arrangements accelerate this passage from radiance to decline. They invite us to savor the present: “The moment is eternity.” Self-taught in botany, he carried out field research on the island of Socotra, Yemen, in 2025.

The residency in Le Muy

In spring 2026, he spent nearly a month in residence at Villa Navarra in Le Muy. There he foraged and studied native Mediterranean plants, such as the navelwort that grows on the villa’s rocks. In the fall, Galerie Enrico Navarra presents his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie 75 Faubourg, On ne voit jamais deux fois la même plante. Ceramic vessels collected from rural Chinese families, stoneware, moss and caudiciform plants explore the way we perceive time.