The Long Floral Journey
2026
15 min,
multi-channel moving-image installation
"San Xian Hua / San Xian Hua" (Three Floral Offerings / Scattered Floral Offerings) is a folk song of the funeral ritual in central Hunan. When night falls, elderly villagers from the community gather around the deceased, singing to see them off in dim lamplight until dawn. During the ritual, a procession of relatives also circles the deceased, walking and singing without cease. The artist’s experience of this ritual is the origin of this work. Throughout the experience, he repeatedly found the images in his memory being fictionalised, altered by the sung words, yet the sensation remained so real. In his perception, memory contains an image-density akin to taste—when tastes are similar, the precision and blur between images in memory become impossible to distinguish as true or false. Drawing on this subtle experience of personal perception, the artist selected images from the entire period since he first possessed image-making tools to construct a tunnel of images along the "floral offering" journey. He converted the images into paper photographs, cutting out details of family history and personal memory, searching for evidence known within the images, enlarging them—enlarging blurred corners—then folding, distorting, and assembling the images into a long tunnel of memory, through which he shuttles with a ghost-like perspective.