Design Map · Eindhoven
Exotic Beings
Graduation project by Ina Hwang at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
‘Naturalisation’ is a term borrowed from biology to describe the transition from foreign to national. In ‘Exotic Beings’, Ina Hwang investigates the mediation between ecological endurance and legal citizenship with an immersive botanical installation which materialises migrant identities. Upon exploration, Korean plants that have a foreign status in the Netherlands, some of them having been labeled as invasive, reappear crafted through a reinterpretation of a traditional Korean papermaking technique. Fragile paper becomes strong, taking the shape of waxed botanical specimens that can find grounding on their own. This embodies the emotional armour worn by migrants to protect themselves from an unstable notion of belonging imposed through othering. Hwang contests the authority to dictate belonging by comparing botanical registries and anti-immigration rhetoric. The audience is invited into a garden where the foreign is reframed as resilient growth. Here, exotic beings are able to recover their sense of inclusion and self-determination.