追花. Chasing Flowers. Chasing Flowers is a series of drawings investigating light and atmosphere through floral still-life. It began in 2014, with a question: “I wonder what flowers — if drawing in charcoal — would look like?”
The flower motif has been part of Memento mori paintings, and the vanitas still-life tradition since the 16th Century. It added a vibrant palette to the sombre theme, representing a kind of transient beauty, which was followed by a blooming, erupting, luscious decay. As a gesture and a tribute to this particular history of floral paintings, these flowers were drawn without colour, and not from photographs, but while bearing witness to its withering. Still-life drawings that are no longer still, but in the midst of dying.
To be with, in death, is perhaps the only way to remember that we are always, already, dying.
in memoriam mortis.
追花. Chasing Flowers, Solo Exhibition, at NUSS, Singapore March to May 2016
There are a total of 13 drawings in this series, 12 of which were exhibited.