Arranged Flowers by Pressure

作品賞析

When she was pregnant, the artist Hsu Yin-Ling felt very stressed about her regular prenatal check-ups, so she relieved her stress by watching bizarre biological videos. When she happened to watch a video introducing an octopus with 99 tentacles, she began to empathize with the octopus, a creature that has powerful regenerative capabilities but is also extremely sensitive. She took this as the inspiration for this work, Arranged Flowers by Pressure. Flower pots are neatly arranged on a set of shelves, but octopus tentacles extend from them, rather like flower stems, and the suckers may be likened to the numerous flower buds growing from them. This strange still life painting, which naturally reflects emotions burdened by the pressures of daily life, is also one of a series of Hsu Yin-Ling’s works that discuss the “sense of existence.” Unlike humans, for whom the hope for survival is a means of survival, the octopus loses the hope for survival under pressure, which is a different survival strategy that humans cannot imitate or learn.