Love Letters
Jiang Zhi
蒋志
Production date
2014
Object Detail
Media
archival inkjet prints
Measurements
14 pieces, 106 x 80 cm
1 piece, 70 x 138 cm
1 piece, 70 x 138 cm
Notes
Love Letters (2014) is a series of photographs of burning blooms. Like seventeenth century Dutch ‘Vanitas’ paintings, in which the falling petals of drooping, fading flowers represent the inevitable decline and death of all earthly living things, Jiang’s works are a memento mori. He soaked the flowers — often orchids, as his wife’s name ‘Lan’ means ‘Orchid’— in alcohol, setting them alight and then shooting multiple images with a fast frame rate. The cold blue flame of methylated spirits burns brightly, but we know it will quickly consume the blossom, and both flame and flower will die. The artist describes this as a process of transformation: ‘The fire is as beautiful as the flower and the flower is also completely without defect — but of course, this is only temporal beauty.’
Fire and flowers appear as symbols in almost every culture: flames signifying destruction and renewal, passion, punishment and purification; flowers as symbols of the abundance and richness of nature, and also of the fleeting nature of beauty and the temporal world. Jiang Zhi arranges single orchid stems, or a few blossoms, in decorative vases against simple backgrounds before dousing them in alcohol and setting them alight. In Love Letters 25, for example, the bright purple and white Phalaenopsis orchids droop heavily over a rustic wooden tabletop from their slender stem, the orange and blue tongues of flame seeming insubstantial, perhaps even powerless to consume such beauty. Love Letters 23 shows a stem of yellow orchids in a black vase, with one blossom fallen onto the same rough table. The flames here are stronger, evoking a brightly burning, consuming passion before its inevitable decline, but still the fire cannot quite destroy the beauty of the flowers.
Vanitas painters often represented earthly mortality with the symbol of a snuffed-out candle, smoke rising as a memory of its flame. In contrast, Jiang Zhi shows the flame itself, but instead of a powerful raging force it seems wispy, insubstantial. Sometimes, as in Love Letters 29, Jiang arranges a single small flower with a long vertical leaf, tendrils of flame rising the length of its diagonal. The largest image in the series most obviously references the symbolism of the memento mori: a spray of orchids rests on a wooden surface, like a sheaf of flowers laid on the lid of a coffin. Fleshy pink and white, they are burning brightly, momentarily distracting us from the fact that they rest on the jawbone of a human skull — or at least a plaster replica.
Fire and flowers appear as symbols in almost every culture: flames signifying destruction and renewal, passion, punishment and purification; flowers as symbols of the abundance and richness of nature, and also of the fleeting nature of beauty and the temporal world. Jiang Zhi arranges single orchid stems, or a few blossoms, in decorative vases against simple backgrounds before dousing them in alcohol and setting them alight. In Love Letters 25, for example, the bright purple and white Phalaenopsis orchids droop heavily over a rustic wooden tabletop from their slender stem, the orange and blue tongues of flame seeming insubstantial, perhaps even powerless to consume such beauty. Love Letters 23 shows a stem of yellow orchids in a black vase, with one blossom fallen onto the same rough table. The flames here are stronger, evoking a brightly burning, consuming passion before its inevitable decline, but still the fire cannot quite destroy the beauty of the flowers.
Vanitas painters often represented earthly mortality with the symbol of a snuffed-out candle, smoke rising as a memory of its flame. In contrast, Jiang Zhi shows the flame itself, but instead of a powerful raging force it seems wispy, insubstantial. Sometimes, as in Love Letters 29, Jiang arranges a single small flower with a long vertical leaf, tendrils of flame rising the length of its diagonal. The largest image in the series most obviously references the symbolism of the memento mori: a spray of orchids rests on a wooden surface, like a sheaf of flowers laid on the lid of a coffin. Fleshy pink and white, they are burning brightly, momentarily distracting us from the fact that they rest on the jawbone of a human skull — or at least a plaster replica.
Accession number
2015.184