YANYUN CHEN

  DETRITUS BOUQUETS. 2025-ongoing

Detritus Bouquets (2025–) emerges from a decade-long inquiry into the entangled relationships between botanical and human life. This ongoing series reconfigures discarded remnants—gathered from the grounds of national parks by park officers—into dramatic bouquets.

Detritus Bouquets: Halia (2026) gathers various forms of kitchen debris, with an attentive focus on the different varieties of ginger used in Southeast Asian cooking. Recombined ginger flowers, stems, and bracts evoke bone structures and alien forms, making strange one of the most commonplace and familiar plant species of the region. Once deemed unusable debris, the familiar is reconfigured into something discordant and unsettling.

Detritus Bouquets: Chinese Fan Palms 1 & 2 (2025) highlights the large and dramatic subtropical palm tree of east Asia, Livistona chinensis, which grows up to 15m heights, and leaf-spans of up to 4m wide. Their fountain-like foliage are often celebrated for its spectacular ornamentation; yet in a different context, these palms are perceived as weeds and invasive species. Regardless of such imposed categories, a fallen leaf becomes simply debris.

Unlike earlier works such as Chasing Flowers (2016) and Flower Flights (2019), which were durational still-life drawings charting the full life cycle of floral arrangements from composition to wilting, Detritus Bouquets animates what remains. These botanical carcasses resist stasis, and beauty may yet be found in waste.

This practice has extended from a series of experiments across time and material: False Truths (2020) intervenes with technology, artificial intelligence, synthetic flora, and political commentary; Risks (2020–2022) employs time distortion as visual vocabulary, where disarray yields only fragments of what was once alive and present; and Veins, Grains, and Striae (2024) reflects on familial kinship and the accumulation of generational wealth, drawing quiet parallels between arboreal flourishing and the growth of a family.