Blooming in Roots

Costa Mesa, California

2026

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​Costa Mesa carries the official reputation of being the "City of the Arts." As the city's official exhibition program, The Exhibition has an over ten-year history. Mengyi was selected by the city as one of three artists of the year to present a four-month solo exhibition.

 

Mengyi's solo exhibition "Blooming in Roots" opens on Sept 10 at the Costa Mesa Senior Center. The exhibition explores flowers, plants, and nature as universal visual language that cross geographic boundaries and take root in different lands, focusing on cultural identity and belonging, and exploring how contemporary art travels across cultures and how art becomes a shared language connecting different cultures and individuals.

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Just as a plant can extend its roots to a distant land and grow and bloom anew in unfamiliar soil and surroundings, the same flowers can also cross borders, blooming across different lands and cultures. The same is true of people."Roots" carry one's cultural memory and identity, while "blooming" symbolizes an individual's continual connection, self-reunderstanding, and formation of new belonging within a new environment.

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Through the universal visual language of flowers, plants, landscape, and nature, "Blooming in Roots" aims to cross language, geography, and cultural background allowing viewers of different experiences to project their own memories and emotions onto familiar natural imagery, and to find their own understanding of home, identity, and belonging. When the artist's work meets the viewer's different memories, the work extends beyond self narrative into a shared and cross-cultural narrative space, which is also precisely the meaning of cross-cultural art that "Blooming in Roots" seeks to explore.