Hypermorph Garden

Shortlisted for Octopus Energy Art Prize 2019/20 ‘Portraits from the Precipice’.

Description:
From the story of this painting, I thought of home gardens, community gardens and botanic gardens in the future. Climate changes, such as prolonged raining season, extreme hot weather and great temperature differences causes flood, forest fires, sickness and animals lost habitats. How are man-made, artificial gardens to survive in such circumstances? Where will be the parks and gardens for children and senior citizens?

I learn this word - 'hypermorph' from Muller's morphs terms. It means a mutation that causes an increase in normal gene function. Horticultural landscapes are mutable. Climate changes have had a significant impact on the landscapes. It promotes mutations. In the future, we will live with the consequences of these mutations.

Story of the painting:
In this painting, I seek to depict the rhetoric vibes of a garden. This is inspired by the narratives from my late grandmother about Taman Jubli Perak in my hometown – Sungai Petani, Kedah. There have a lot of ornamental plants, such as Hibiscus Rosa-Sinensis in range of colours: crimson red, golden yellow, bright white, orange and the pink mini Ixora that seldom bloomed. My late grandmother loved flowers, especially loved admiring blossoms in the morning. However, her vision started to decrease drastically in her early 80s. The ever-changing scenes in the blossoming garden became blurry to her. For a period, she almost lost seeing the garden in vivid colours. Through other sensory organs, such as nose, ears, skin and palms, she experienced anew vibes around her from molecular level. I use the gestural expressionistic vibrant floral and quasi-static butterflies to reveal the vibes suggested by her sensory perception. To me as a listener, her narrative suggested a series of fragmented, distorted, molecular images derived from visual deficiencies. I painted the fictitious blooms in blocks and let the blocks shuffled, overlapped and impacted to each other to create multiple images in deficit. This multiplication elaborates the complex visual conditions of my late grandmother’s eyes. I used brushes and palette knives to make paintings of the images through (1) intertwining the contradicting patterns: the organic compounds of blooms entangled within the rigid, geometrical blocks and (2) superimposing the circular molecular layer randomly, partially. I painted the vibes in a range of colourful tones. It aims to channel the deficient images to aesthetical direction and to encourage a respect, a bravery and a confession of the imperfect conditions of human eyes, such as aging, obscurity and impermanence are innovatory artistic direction.

This painting is signed on the front or back and includes my Certificate of Authenticity.

Art © 2019-2022 Fuen Chin. All Rights Reserved.