Untamed Florescence

Crawling, Trembling, and Reaching Out

With our current use of plants and flowers in urban design and interior decoration, we imbue plants with a passive quality. The concept of nature is simplified and idealized by bringing indoor exotic plants and taming them in a block of soil. Yet as we watch the time-lapse photography of plant growth, the movements resembling acts of crawling, trembling, and reaching out shift our attention away from their aesthetic image, and reintroduce them as mysterious creatures filled with power and agency. Inspired by these motions, Min extracted the momentum of flower growth to give shapes to a series of lamps, showing the drastic force behind their growth countering the common perception of flowers as 'delicate' and 'ephemeral'. Samples of colors and textures were taken from a variety of flowers, yet the final design only demonstrates their growth trajectories rather than their figurative shapes. The forms extending against gravity inject a sense of wildness into the design, revealing an untamable tension within.

Fragility and Tenacity

Using fragile materials of paper and wax, the work embraces its own fragility and reminds us of our temporal existence among different species. Having experimented with the combination of paper and wax in her work, Min developed a special treatment of paper similar to paper mache. But instead of applying pulp to a premade mold, full pieces of paper are placed together and hung onto a wire frame. The design process is a constant adjusting of structure and balancing of weight, the tenacity of paper shows through the stabilized form.