Faramita Flowers

Poetry for unknown from old photos

Last year, a friend of mine showed me 50 old photos of Shanghai he had found from untique market, developed from several old rolls of film, and wondered who they were. These photos inspired me, and I used them as the main characters to create a new series. 

In one of the photos, the woman is surrounded by flowers call Manjusaka. In Chinese, the name of the flower has a special meaning: the flower is on both sides of the river between life and death.

In January this year, I finished this work with a large-scale industrial scanner, which is my first attempt to use technology other than camera to make "image". I want to use this work to talk about the existence and extinction of life, the memory and forgetting in time.

                                                                                            by Artist MALEONN MA