Studio,London

2022

The work explores the ideological similarity between flowers and human experiences in the spectrum of life and death. Flowers often symbolize emotions of joy and sorrow, appearing in significant moments of people's lives, such as weddings and funerals, where roses play a crucial role. This is why I chose to create props on the model in the form of roses, as the ideological duality of life and death that roses embody is remarkably similar to that of humans.

Whether it's flowers or humans, they are both subjectively endowed with much meaning in life. Flowers cannot subjectively choose life or death, and humans are subjectively given life, unable to decide whether to be born or not. Upon birth, humans are objectively assigned male or female, but as they grow older, they can subjectively define their own gender, just like flowers cannot subjectively determine their gender. I chose a model who subjectively identifies as a woman but is physiologically male. During the shoot, I guided him to forget the concept of gender, simply becoming a life like a flower. They stretched their limbs like petals and branches, improvising the process of sprouting, growing, blooming, and eventually withering away, just like a flower.

In this work, I used black and white film to photograph a model and Polaroid to capture flowers. I printed the black and white film onto the lower half of ILFORD paper using an enlarger, and then transferred the Polaroid using Emulsion LIFT to the upper half of the ILFORD paper. In the end, the result is a single print where the upper half features coloured flowers and the lower half showcases a black and white model, both appearing simultaneously on the same ILFORD paper. The movements of the model correspond to the matched flowers, illustrating the ideological similarity between flowers and humans. In this way, I emphasize the contrast between black and white and colour, implying a contrast between life and death to represent the subjective and objective perspectives of life and death. The enlargement of the black and white film represents the subjectivity of death, while the colour Polaroid represents the objectivity of life's birth.