The Chinese Court Garden inside the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is modeled on a Ming dynasty scholar’s courtyard, a place of contemplation and harmony between man and nature. Over the course of several days, the artist took water samples from a pond in the garden, gradually adjusting the water conditions to make it livable for fish, then released his goldfish into the pond. An understated intervention that was unauthorized by the Met, it nonetheless did not go entirely unnoticed by the museum (even if it wasn’t aware of its status as a ‘work’) as, discovering fish already living there, they later added koi fish to the pond.
