Jiang Zhi's iconic Love Letters stretched from 2010 to 2023. Part mourning ritual and part elegiac poetry, the series poignantly connects the transience of blooming flowers to the instantaneity of inevitable death, both of which are abundantly represented across different cultures. Jiang set different kinds of flowers ablaze, and captured the split second when petals and flame coexisted in an elegant equanimity. The artist has thus staged a visceral way to mourn, to imagine suffering, and to create an temporal moment suspended between destruction and rebirth, agony and sweet melancholy.

Artists: Jiang Zhi