Tsuchimoto’s research topic is a quest for artistic narratives that unfold memories of imperial violence through the history of gardens combined with personal anecdotes. Her main objective is to understand botany from an eighteenth-century point of view, to imagine botanist positions and gazes towards plants and the Other by tracing the roots of the network of male botanists and their institutionalized process to turn the Garden into a botanical garden. She also keeps a critical eye on the technologies of exhibitions and collections in botanical gardens as a whole, the roles of plants in European colonial empires, and the vertical relations between botanists and gardeners. In addition, the botanical expeditions and collections make her reconnect with her cultural background, reimagining the arrivals of the European botanists in Japan during the national isolation (1639-1854) and how it impacted Japanese modernization, imperialism, and eventually post-war development.
