Flux In Suspension

Plants undergo endless cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration. As their seeds disperse and vines extend, they continually claim new terrain—and in doing so, open portals across space. In this series, I revisit the possibilities of photographic experimentation by weaving the plant’s organic “continuance” into photography’s deliberate time-arresting quality. staging a dialogue that probes the divergences of time and space within a single frame.

Using 6×7 medium-format film, I combine multiple exposure, hand-processing in the darkroom, and graphic design to form a hybrid practice. I chose black-and-white film precisely because it strips away color’s rhetorical allure, refocusing attention on tone, structure, and texture. Throughout the series, multiple exposure operates as the guiding methodological through-line, leveraging the film emulsion’s latitude to superimpose imagery and thereby engender stratified discontinuities at the juncture of time and space.

Conceptually, the work draws on Henri Bergson’s notion of la durée: lived time as a continuous, flowing experience rather than the clock’s “tick-tock.” Photography, by contrast, arrests that flow—slicing it into discrete fragments. Plant life embodies Bergson’s durée: an incommensurable, irreducible, continuous, and irreversible vital temporality. When photography intervenes, it does not capture the plant’s genuine continuity but instead freezes a single, surface moment shaped by the photographer’s gaze. Photography does not replicate the organic rhythms of natural growth; rather, it constitutes a symbolic re-presentation of vital temporality. It becomes both a human-imposed rupture and the viewer’s interface with life’s flux.

In practice, I layer images of plants, sculptures, and architecture in-camera via multiple exposure. In one of the works，reflections on water merge with forest silhouettes to form temporal strata: one layer depicts the “visible present,” while another hints at a “latent past.” Past and present, natural and artificial, cohabit the same frame. My intention is to disrupt the viewer’s habitual perception of temporal flow, offering instead an alternative, more fragmented and heterogeneous experience of time.

Ultimately, this series investigates how photography mediates our understanding of time. It invites viewers to consider how images intervene in—and reconstruct—their perception of nature’s continuum, prompting renewed reflection on the bond between human vision and life’s relentless flux.