HIDING YOUR FLOWERS BEHIND
Hiding your flowers behind
Installation
Variable dimensions
2025
This is an installation grounded in existential and nihilistic thought, continuing my exploration of the fragile boundary between presence and disappearance.
Structured across three spatial planes—floor, wall, and ceiling—the work mirrors three stages of life: growth, regulation, and decay. On the floor, blooming peonies are clustered in piles, their pressed juices staining fabric with ephemeral imprints. Peonies, traditionally symbols of prosperity and wealth in Chinese culture, here become metaphors for inevitable decline—the opulence that seeps away under pressure, echoing the core idea that all grandeur fades. On the wall, flowers are meticulously trimmed into geometric forms and embedded into painted wooden panels, appearing confined within invisible frames. This gesture reflects both the constraints imposed by societal norms and the tension between formal order and existential void found in the vinitas, a key conceptual reference in this work.
Above, the ceiling is draped with fabric saturated in floral pigment and scorched with traces of fire. These burn marks function as temporal scars, evoking both the violence of time and the dissolution of meaning. The space is enveloped in a quiet solemnity, inviting viewers to confront the paradox of a world where vitality and emptiness coexist.
By referencing the aesthetic logic of the Vanitas and using the peony as a symbolic and material anchor, Traces constructs a visual paradox: the simultaneous presence of fullness and absence, order and collapse, life and vanishing. It poses a central question—when opulence inevitably gives way to void, what remains of what once bloomed? A record? A resistance? Or simply a trace?