Severed blooms always stir a feeling of nausea within me, a strange tension between admiration and a sense of violence. Their beauty is undeniable, yet it's a beauty impregnated with something darker—their impermanence, their severed stems, all evoke a sense of being unrooted, as if they've been beheaded.
Yes, there's something unsettling about how the beauty of these flowers is manufactured. They are cultivated, carefully nurtured, and designed to be visually perfect, to be attractive. Yet, this beauty is not for their own sake but for a brief moment in a vase, where they are left in a state of limbo, suspended between life and death. Their entire existence is orchestrated for this fleeting display, grown only to be severed and left to wither. Their beauty, as striking as it is, carries with it a sense of inevitability, a predetermined fate, both cruel and unnatural. In this way, their beauty becomes unsettling. It's as if their entire purpose is reduced to a nonchalant gesture, only to be discarded once their beauty fades.
As an artist working in the context of new materialism, I intuitively sought a process that blurs the lines between physical and digital materiality. Grappling with the themes of transience, the scanning process "freezes" the flower in time, while the AI interpretation introduces a new, artificial life cycle.

The resulting videos depict surreal, gradually disintegrating flower forms, mimicking a dissolving film. At its core, this work questions our understanding of impermanence in an increasingly digital world. As physical flowers wilt and fade, their digital counterparts undergo a different kind of entropy—one that blurs the line between preservation and dissolution. The project challenges viewers to consider: How does digitization alter our perception of time and decay? In what ways does the materiality of digital media influence the longevity and mutation of information? Can the digital realm truly offer permanence, or does it simply introduce new forms of ephemerality? By transforming a personal moment of celebration into an ongoing digital metamorphosis, "Graduation Flowers" invites reflection on the nature of memory, the lifecycle of data, and the evolving relationship between physical artifacts and their digital shadows. It seeks to bridge the gap between the immediate, tactile experience of cut flowers and the persistent, yet ever-changing nature of their data-driven afterlives. In this exploration, we confront a central question: When a flower blooms in digital space, does it ever truly wither?