For over a decade, artist and theorist Kwan Queenie Li has photographed weeds across cities around the world—from Jerusalem and Shanghai to Varanasi, Athens, Cairo, and Mexico City. Found in cracks, corners, ruins, and construction sites, these unintended urban inhabitants become quiet witnesses to how cities grow, shift, and break apart.

Blending image and text, this essay proposes a new way of seeing the built environment through the weed’s point of view. Weeds dissolve familiar ideas of borders, walls, history, and identity, revealing the city as an evolving, porous space shaped as much by neglect and disuse as by possibility and freedom.