The painful flower /  Tzu Fen Lin x Pei Hui

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When interviewing Pei Hui, I found that handicraft and tailoring to her is a relief aside from her works and family. Tailoring time is one of the most cherished spare time for her own. Inherited from her grandmother's conscientiousness, she has put lots of effort on kids, parent and her work. However, she also suffered a lot of pain for overusing her hands, leading to a hand surgery. Even though aftereffects made her harder to do tailoring for longtime, she devoted to this interests and even got custom order from acquaintances. It’s like a symmetric to flowers blooming in adversity.

 

Bandages to a wound works like a cocoon to a silkworm. Wrapping bandage and dressing on wound is not only a physical healing process, it also gives mental comfort to be supported and protected.

 

Aiming to show her painful and joyful feeling on hands, I use red yarn and reddish plastic bag yarn to indicate her scars as well as passion. Based on white gauze bandages, you can see abstract shape of flowers blossom upon her hands, visualizing the painful beauty.

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Wearable art: blossom in adversity

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Like people, plants are vulnerable to a wide variety of everyday stressors. Those stress factors might include biotic stress and abiotic stress. The former stress would include living disturbances such as fungi or harmful insects. Whereas the later stress occurs naturally as drought or harming temperature change, intense sunlight. Surprisingly, studies show that stressed plants might say it with flowers switching from vegetative growth to reproductive growth. Plants tend to flower earlier if placed under stressful conditions. This phenomenon has been called stress-induced flowering.

 

Same condition might also work on humans. Appropriate of stress keeps us feeling alive and excited about life. Failures and setbacks, although uncomfortable, will accumulate our life experience. When we overcome difficulties, we grow and mature as human beings.

 

The exhibition “Wearable Art: Blossom in Adversity” is curated by NO!W Across Lab with assistance of Taipei Women's Center by linking local women with artists. Focusing on three different topics of the subject: scars, strength and symbiosis, artist interviewed local women and reinterpreted their stories into wearable art.

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More details about exhibition：link