In the Rose Rose  photography series, every rose has been sewn together.

Roses are normally showy, dazzling spectacles, but the stitches on the petals here present us, through an infinitely serene approach, with an unadorned display of injury.

Maybe the stitches are there to keep the roses from withering and to extend the time before they bloom? Maybe the stitches are there to solidify their beauty?

At that moment when the needle penetrates the flower petals, the small cuts that appear bring feelings of shame and remorse, as if we are watching wings broken just as they are about to take flight. There is a persistent heaviness here, an inescapable feeling of helplessness.

Regardless, those glaring stitches, stuck so deeply into the flower petals, create a sense of dynamic injury taking place upon a static exterior. Under the warm gaze of light, these wounds tell of unfathomable contradictions.

That light in the darkness – that’s right, I designed that theatrical lighting – is it a penetrating gaze, or just mere perplexity?

 “Things” have memory. I’ve been obsessed with this memory ever since I painted the first of the Dress  series. Its murky air can represent very personal memories, or the cultural memories of a generation. It can bring a sense of belonging to every ordinary moment, or it can bring about inexplicable terror. For a brilliant, radiant life, it is more like a cruel joke.

One must know that life is very fragile, very easily damaged. Violence, imprisonment, even persistence can turn into the most dangerous and unseen form of injury.

Though roses have sharp thorns, they are fragile. They are innocent and helpless. They look uneasily towards the uncertain future. They are wholly unprepared to be harmed, and they cannot take it.

Hope and hopelessness, love and pain, life and death, struggle and surrender, nurturing and destruction…only a fine line stands between them.

Lin jing jing Notes on " Rose Rose "