Contexts
Artist work:
Zhenhua Xiang
"Serdeco" is to shoot a group of dying plants that are thrown away, and finally burn these plants to powder. "The first time I photographed dead plants came from people's questioning about the definition of aesthetics. I directly used the name of a flower shop as the title of the work." Said Zhenhua. In Zhenhua's view, under normal circumstances, people's choices for objects that appear around them are either functional or decorative. Plants, especially those sold in flower shops are mostly "artificial objects" planted artificially. People choose their fresh and natural growth forms to decorate the space. However, once they are withered or visually incomplete, these Plants lose the meaning of keeping and are eliminated before being used. During the few years when he created this work, he picked up the plants he saw in the garbage bins of the flower shop near his home, and placed them in a space, waiting for them to slowly dry up. Although this state is fragile, if not to touch, these brittle plants will always exist". When plants are put into images, they are like fossils in a museum. These photos are the deposits of gray tones completely deposited by time. We will not discuss the instantaneousness of fossils, but we can see the elongated time from the photos, and the aesthetics of these frozen plants will naturally be reflected. For plants, in an anthropocentric world, their growth attributes, plant shapes, roots, stems, leaves, flowers and fruits are all defined by the human knowledge system and entered the genus and species of the order Phylum, He burn and carbonize these dried plants one by one, and all the natural attributes and artificial definitions are finally turned into black powder. The only difference is the volume they accumulate in space, and this volume is so light that when we watch it, we can hardly breathe. Let them spread out. The last existence has nothing to do with color, shape, definition, but only with existence itself. "
Before using essential oil for artistic creation, artists need to understand the composition, use and side effects of essential oils in order to better control the amount and risk of usage.
"Nature is heaven and earth, and nature is more lawful. Focusing on it allows me to see 'big' and 'small', and experience 'can' and 'can't'." Video artist Zhenhua talked about his works that focus on nature in a very Zen way. Throughout his series of works, it is not difficult to find that he is discussing the relationship between man and the "man-made objects" around him, and nature is one of the most important propositions he has been carrying on. "It is a carrier." Zhenhua suggest that this should be related to the environment where he grew up. From rural fields to high-rise buildings, he has seen that in the decades of development, not only nature has been transformed and destroyed, but also the destroyed Self-preservation evidence that disappears naturally. Human memory is an unreliable thing, it will be mottled, it will fall off, so when and in what way can we keep it for ourselves? He is trying to obtain the evidence of material or relationship. Zhenhua’s works and philosophy are heading toward a different direction from my work. The way he analyses the relationship between plants, nature and human society is from a broader perspective and combining his culture background and history. I am inspired by his way of thinking and the use of material to reflect on wider range of phenomenon and culture. Even though we are working on different topic but his way of presentation with plants are interesting and make me think again what kind of character that plants are playing in my work. Rather than sculpting a piece of work for a long time, Zhenhua prefers to create art in the form of projects. Although the creation process of projects as a cycle will be somewhat repetitive, it is relatively neat, unlike painting, which needs to maintain emotions Continuity. In the subsequent shooting of all plants, Zhenhua handled the image style very calmly, no matter how serious the subject was. He thinks this is a way of creation, or an attitude. In fact, art is completely a state of natural growth for him. He compares himself to a fruit tree, calmness is the expression of his creative results, and seriousness is the soil for his rooting.
Artist work:
Fang Chen
Fang Chen uses leaves to make bodiless lacquerware. It started when Chen Fang picked up a piece of Tung tree leaf at the door of her house. "Through the sunlight, I saw the special texture in the leaf veins, and I started to get creative." Fang Chen said. Then, she extended it to experimenting with various leaves such as Magnolia, looking for leaves with different natural textures and suitable shapes to do more experiments. She chose the subject of leaves to follow the "Tao nature", which is an instinctive approach and a pure pursuit of texture and shape. "Fang covered it with cloth, ash, and lacquer, and removed the leaves after setting the shape, finally leaving only their textures and shapes. The lacquer used in the bodiless lacquerware comes from the lacquer tree, and the carrier is the leaves, which is like an artificial "reincarnation" and "return to the origin". The cloth is obtained from hemp, the ashes are made from pottery, and the lacquer is harvested from lacquer trees. These are all obtained from nature, and it takes two months to make each batch of leaves. Her works are process through series of experiment and failure because of the unstable and fragile nature of the material.
I am more interested in Fang Chen’s thoughts about nature and the way she extends it to life cycle and relevant philosophies. Fang's works are both natural and random but also loyal to the original works. Starting from the material, she used the fallen leaves at the end of their lives to freeze the time in the shape of bodiless lacquerware and found the natural attributes of this technique and material and brought them into play to express her personal aesthetics. Those fallen leaves that were thrown were reborn. This is similar to my initial ideas about the plants’ power project, the reasons why I Insist on using pure natural materials is I want to keep my work consistent with the themes and my core ideas, focusing on the characteristics of plants without disturb by other issue.
Artist work:
Ling Meng
Ling Meng's works are the product of the combination of natural history and art. Such works are generally drawn from nature. Through observation, exploration, collection and arrangement of nature and natural materials, artists use artistic techniques and works to express their understanding and imagination of nature, the relationship between nature and people, their insides, emotions, and experiences. His works include a series of behavioral processes of exploration, discovery, thinking and selection. They do not simply present the beauty of nature but incorporate the artist's personal life experience and knowledge accumulation, and even scientific algorithms, allowing natural objects of different time and space attributes to be reshaped, read, and given meaning. He collects natural elements such as plants, flowers, ores, and soil in his own way, and the "time" of nature is preserved forever. This kind of work combines scientific rationality and high sensitivity outside the discipline. Ling uses "physical" materials but breaks away from the framework of the natural discipline system to explore a broader spiritual field. The image above of the calyx specimens of the blue hydrangea are from the series "Shanghai Winter's Departure". In Ling's view, from the moment these natural plants were made into specimens, they escaped their original fate of birth, old age, sickness, and death. Completely preserved, like a specimen that preserves time fragments.
There is one thing I agree with Ling Meng is that he believes he didn't design his creations, he didn't make them, he was just lucky enough to find them. There are many joys in nature and life, which need to be discovered slowly. Similarly, just like the other artists I am looking at, they are all starting from the idea of “plants”, something natural and can easily found in our daily life. The leaves turn yellow, break out of the cocoon, the old and the new alternate, and the cycle of life goes on and on. This moment and the next moment of oneself are all driven by time and leave a mark. Ling's works are recording every time point of a living body. In the eyes of many people, death is often the last part of life, and what he wants to express is to make people think and examine the meaning of life, whether it is family members, friends, or flowers and grass, this is life equal to life and that’s it. So how to face death calmly is a very important life topic.
Book:
What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz
The author believes in animism, plants understand their compassion, they enjoy sunshine and rain like other creatures on the earth, they are equal to us. The author divides the way plants perceive the world into six aspects: vision, smell, touch, hearing, proprioception, and memory. Using anthropomorphic expressions, each part is based on the scientific history of human understanding of plants, and integrates plant physiology, Unfathomable theories such as genetics and molecular biology are explained in easy-to-understand language.
Plants can "see" the world. The plant's shoots can "see" blue light and direct the stems to bend in the direction of the sun, so the plant is said to be phototropic. The leaves of plants contain phytochrome, which can not only "see" red light that humans can see, but also "see" far-red light that humans cannot see. Plants have more types of photoreceptors than humans, and it is through these photoreceptors that plants know when to bloom, when to rest, and when to bend toward the light. Of course, there are also "blind" individuals among plants. Plants, like humans, have a circadian clock, so sunflowers will slowly turn their flowers back after the sun goes down, and then slowly face the east at about 3 am, waiting for another round of sun to rise.
Plants can control the aging of leaves and the ripening of fruits by respond to smell. In fact, after a plant has been attacked by bacteria and bitten by animals, it will use chemical gases to "alert" nearby unharmed branches and leaves, and these branches and leaves will receive the smell and strengthen their defenses. Plants can "feel" touch. Mimosa and Venus flytrap are very familiar examples. Touching the leaves of mimosa or the bristles of flytrap can trigger an action potential, causing the leaf to close. Plants don't like the invasion of wind and rain, and they don't like the touch from the outside world. Touching will cause growth retardation of plants because plants have physical sensations. Since one leaf is always "violated", it is better to supply nutrients elsewhere. Plants know their place. There are balance stones in the root tip of the plant, and the balance stone tells it where there is gravity, so the plant can always take root towards the center of the earth. The plant's shoot tip contains auxin, which directs its growth toward the light.
Plants can remember experiences. An example of short-term memory is the fact that if a bug triggers two of the flytrap's quills in succession within 20 seconds, it activates the trap. The scientist did an experiment to verify that plants have long-term memory: He deliberately stabbed the cotyledon on one side of Bidens Pilosa, and then picked off its two terminal buds two weeks later. If the cotyledons are not injured, the axillary buds on both sides should grow equally. However, the Bidens Pilosa "remembered" it was being stabbed before, and only the axillary buds were uninjured two weeks ago grow. Moreover, even if this memory is only last for a few minutes (removing the injured cotyledon after a few minutes), the plant will still remember it. Plants can also remember the climate of the year so that they can wait for the cold winter ends and wait until the temperature rises before flowering. Unlike humans, plants are "deaf". However, in the genes of plants, the same gene as that of deaf humans can be found - the "deaf" gene. Because of these performances of plants, the author firmly believes that plants are conscious. Although taking a different evolutionary path from ours, plants are distant relatives of humans. They can perceive complex environments and share the same genes as us.
If humans and plants have similar abilities, they can both be aware of complex light environments, intricate smells, and various physical stimuli, if humans and plants both have preferences and memories, can we treat plants as the same as us? I am very happy to learn scientific theories from this book that can support multiple consciousnesses of plants. Which made my thinking more reasonable. That emphasizes the vitality of plants, they are not just decoration of our life but individual with feelings. Which means it is possible to communicate with them and share our energy and thoughts.