Fancy eating your sad office sarnies in a cacoon of bamboo? Somerset House is turning its bombastic neoclassical courtyard into a garden full of the panda food which you can frolic about in for free to enjoy a quick picnic, a moment of calm in your busy work day, or an inevitable photo-op.
The immersive installation is a new large-scale commission from Hong-Kong based artist Zheng Bo that ‘invites visitors to temporarily disconnect from their fast-paced, hyper-connected everyday lives by immersing themselves in the biosphere’. The idea is that people draw while they’re in the urban jungle, selecting a bamboo leaf from a variety of species to sketch, with the completed drawings becoming fertiliser for the garden ‘completing a loop of creativity and ecology’.