wishes from the chrysanthemum: a retrospective look, one year later
my emotions have been particularly heightened, which is evident in my chewed up left inner cheek and the incessant wringing of my wrists before bed. that is to say, this moment is a horrible time to think... but! an opportune time to write freely. so here i am, sitting at a dining table that isn’t mine. inexplicably hunched over in a hoodie while the humid 90° air continues to threaten my already smudged makeup of yesterday. unromantically at the brink of tears every 30 minutes. barley holding it together.
and i’m thinking –– now!! now! is the time to finally reflect on the art show that was immensely momentous to my life!!!
so here it is. my reflections on ‘wishes from the chrysanthemum’, one year later.
it’s odd to think that this time last year, i was engaged in extreme hyper productivity; i was obsessively constructing a massive light sculpture and singlehandedly putting together an art show, all while maintaining a full time job that i was deeply dedicated to, keeping up with a rigorous yoga practice, maintaining a live streaming schedule, packing up all my belongings into boxes, and seeing as many friends as possible before my aimless roadtrip around the states.
nowadays? i’ve been struggling to finish the same book i’ve been reading for months. making work that i can’t bring myself to share. doing nearly nothing but feeling so, so tired.
there was something about the promise of what life could be in the autumn of 2021 that fueled my every waking moment. i had just turned 30, and, in preparation for that turn of a decade, had gone through 6 months of EMDR therapy that drained me emotionally but lifted me mentally. my days were filled with creating art that helped me understand how i wanted my life to be shaped, and my dreams were inundated with these unbearably vivid, almost kaleidoscopic images of how it would feel. everything was so vibrant, so magnificent.
fueled by this unbridled optimism, i began to set aggressive artistic deadlines for myself and put all my plans into motion. the contrast between my motivation back then and the present day brings up a question that has been simmering in my head: why do i feel chained to some impossible, romantic idea that art needs to come from a pure, internal place?
making work is often tethered to the assumption that art comes from an undeniable impulse to create, as if nothing else can possibly be right in the world if you do not bring it into being. it’s silly to imagine inspiration floating down from the stratosphere and myself, in true manic pixie dream girl fashion, whimsically capturing it with a fashionably vintage film camera and cottagecore-esque paint-crusted brushes
in reality, a large part of my ability to churn out so much work last year was directly related to two things: 1) setting pressure cooker deadlines to hold myself against and 2) meaningfully embedding myself amongst a community that cares about my work enough to generate expectations that can push me to have the discipline to work hard. discipline. that’s the keyword.
of course, inspiration is paramount, but life is ever generous in gifting that to us if we are open enough. what is lacking, however, is the discipline to create and the discipline to share.
and that brings us to my next curiosity: why must it be a necessity that the art is shared? shouldn’t the creation be enough in and of itself?
creating, sure, can be for the sake of creating. but i also believe that what makes something ‘art’ is in the sharing of it, in the release of it from being just yours. it becomes art by no longer belonging to you. it becomes art by belonging to the greater world.
the most memorable part of the art show was hearing people, of all walks of life, opening up their hearts to each other by sharing their own experiences with intimacy and loss through the lens of the work they were gazing upon together. in another corner of the room, i saw a group gathered around a girl who was teaching others how to fold paper cranes. one by one, they stood at the edge of the flower installation and tossed in their golden cranes. it was so beautiful that i felt like crying.
never in my life would i ever have thought this many people would come together to see what i made in my tiny apartment. and further —– never in my life would i have ever thought it could mean anything to anyone. it no longer felt like any of this art belonged to me, in the same way the attendees’ conversations could never be mine. the art took on an entirely new life of its own as soon as someone else beheld it, and it felt selfish to demand that it must mean one thing or another.
this convergence could only be possible through the act of sharing.
although most of my paintings and photo prints have found new homes, the flower is currently in my brother’s garage, its petals hanging heavy from the layer of dust that is now a permanent part of the piece. come to think of it, i can’t remember the fate of any of the other installations and sculptures i’ve made in my life. the hopeful optimist would guess they are bringing life into their new surroundings. the brutal pessimist would guess they have been destroyed in a dumpster somewhere.
how can something be worth making if it doesn’t end up being of “value”? and even more troubling, how can something that was all-consuming of my life for months, sometimes years, be this forgotten in my memory?
the physical object itself doesn’t seem to hold a lot meaning, as much as i try to pile on symbols on top of symbols. i can talk all day about what each petal of the chrysanthemum is meant to represent, how the meticulous unfurling from the core has an immensity as great as our sun, how 10,000 paper cranes are embedded in a culture that is not my own...
and yet, at the end of it all, the physicality of each these parts are no longer. the meaning is all we’re left with. the memory of the conversations we had, the way it felt to stand witness to it. but the actual piece itself? completely and utterly worthless.
this concept is still difficult for me to fully grasp. i constantly yearn for both permanence and nostalgia, always caught in the middle of creating something that can stand the test of time and creating something that illustrates the power of the present.
why do we strive to make these kinds of ephemeral pieces of artwork? like the perfect moment of a dance or musical performance, maybe this is the way for visual arts to emerge from a dimension of time that it was held captive. maybe this is how it can hold people captive. maybe… when art is released from the captivity of time, it is in turn able to hold people captive in a moment of time.
if i believe art is meant to be shared, why is it that i chose to create something that is painfully fleeting, meant to be experienced at a very specific moment in time, as opposed to building something that can last forever and provide meaning over and over again? why make a massive chrysanthemum light sculpture that no one will ever lie beneath again, that no one will ever contribute handcrafted paper cranes to again, that no one will ever watch twinkle in the darkness of a room filled with quiet voices of familiar strangers?
in a world where we are completely inundated with visual and auditory noise, scroll after scroll (worse now – flick after flick), maybe it’s these blips of finiteness where we can feel something most acutely. maybe that’s what it takes for us to look up, notice, and engage.
this project was something that was meant to mark the end of a massive chapter in my life. like i mentioned earlier, i had just turned 30, i was planning to leave a hometown that i have a complicated relationship with, and i was grappling with the 10 year anniversary of my mom’s passing.
for something that was meant to be cathartic, the elated feeling of accomplishment completely evaded me. i was just the same, if not more lost. i woke up the next morning on the concrete floor of an apartment full of nothing but boxes. though it was good timing to have so many chapters closing at once, it caused me to be ungracefully ushered into the unknown, and i didn’t have time to stop and reflect, to really, really have the catharsis i sought.
a few days ago, looked back at my journal and saw that i didn’t write a single thing about the show. i didn’t feel pride, i didn’t feel like i had done anything worth anything. i ended the year wondering if i had accomplished anything in 2021. a dark cloud continued to float above my head, and i fully welcomed it. the mind can be so cruel sometimes.
sometimes it can feel like you need to remain in that place of darkness to make good work. it’s as if you need to force yourself to resist healing. although i can’t claim to know what it means to ‘heal’, i understand what it means to have a healthier outlook on all that occurred.
for example, i don’t completely understand what it means to really heal from the loss of my mother. i miss her constantly. always at unpredictably mundane times. it’s not mother’s day, it’s when i get a mysterious bump on my skin and want to ask her about remedies. it’s not her birthday, it’s when i meet a boy and wonder if her intuition could cure my self-conscious doubts about love. it’s not the month of november, it’s when i go to a rundown food court in a stale mall where i can imagine us sitting, crying while holding each other’s hands.
i could keep on going, on and on and on. see? it’s much easier to linger on these thoughts. but i could also choose to do the more difficult task of putting into focus the 20 years in which her teachings and presence shaped me into the human being that i am today.
of course of course of course there will always be darkness, but i can learn how to think of the light, to seek the wisdom, empathy, and love within all of the awfulness that was carelessly handed to me. that’s where i want to be. that’s who i want to become.
but is that at the cost of creating interesting work? and does making work about this cheapen that experience in some way, especially if it comes from a place of indulgence?
i don’t want to be doomed to sadness just to make something meaningful. i don’t believe meaningful things must come from that place. i have to believe that there is a great capacity for my work to contain joy as well. after all, how can any work be interesting without constantly evolving? how can any work be interesting if it stays stuck in one single moment in time, without the opportunity to expand into infinitely more colorful emotions, moving along a spectrum that is beyond our imagination?
i don’t want to diminish the beauty of what it means to go through grief and put in the work of reflecting, understanding, and turning it all into something that can be meaningful, both for myself and the people around me. but perhaps that is why this installation and this show needed to be ephemeral. it needed to have a defined beginning and ending for me to move forth and exist in a much richer emotional space. perhaps the catharsis was aptly not in the accomplishment of making work, but in the ability to pack up my bags, get into my car, and drive away.
i want to keep living, and i know that i simply cannot if i continue to indulge in my rolodex of childhood woes. i want to demand more –– more out of myself, out of my experiences, and out of my art. i want it all to evolve and become more complex with age, not cycle through an endless nightmare of regurgitated emotions.
we all deserve more.
