Weightless - KyungAh Hwang

"Weightless 27", 36" x 36" Acrylic on Canvas

Weightless

I was watering the orchid that my friend had brought to my last show. Strangely, my eyes were fixated on not the flowers in bloom, but a withered one, lifeless and shriveled. Its glamour and glory had gone away, and now only the dry carcass hung precariously from its stem. It seemed to speak of an arduous human life reaching towards its end.

Although I have been working around the theme of ‘vitality’ during the last several years, it was not until that moment, when I realized that I have been only preoccupied with the blooming flowers and its sprouting buds. The withered flowers and its parched limbs presented itself to me as a completely different perspective on the vital force of life and beauty.

In the process of drying selected species of flowers, photographing them, increasing the scale and floating them inside a gravity-less space, I was able to discover glimpses of this vitality—one perhaps more alive than the living—through its enlarged wrinkles. The formal complexity of its weakened body expresses graceful, ethereal beauty behind fragility and death.

As I witness small cycles of life in the glorious fragility of flowers, I daydream, listening to the weightless flutters of souls.