TIME: Growth and Decay
“Are you happy to grow up?”
“Are you satisfied with every change in your life?”
“Have you ever been disappointed at these changes occurred in your life?”
“Is there any difference about growth between your imagination and the reality? ”
When I first brainstormed for the project, I wanted to work on a piece that is meaningful and is able to represent the concept of time in the meanwhile. I certainly realized that “growth” is the most impactful term for me through the whole year. Nevertheless, I decided to finish up this project with this impactful term but with my own definition. In my opinion, “growth” can be very subjective, which depends on the differences between our experiences and stories. Personally, I believed growth cannot easily be categorized into positive or negative. “Growth” is always a controversial event that brings me happiness and frustration at the same time. We are always losing certain things as long as we are growing up.
On the other hand, choosing the vivid red rose as the presentation object is because I believed it is the most relevant natural object that can express my feeling of growth. The vivid red rose has a glamorous appearance, but its life is comparatively short. Most people only perceive your success on the stage, but they will hardly understand your tiredness and sadness behind. We are always ambitious to be the more mature and more effective people in the world, but sometimes, it is frustrated to be part of the ideal ones.
“As we grow up, we lost certain things within our original selves.”
“We gradually became afraid of making mistakes and forgot how we used to laugh heartily.”
In this case, when the doodling of the growing rose on the transparent papers are alternating with the photography of the decaying rose on normal papers, people can see the doodling of the growing rose can be seen from both sides as flipping through the pages.
“But as we grew up, we learned.
We learned to become more independent and responsible.
We learned to understand our true selves.
We learned to get along with our disadvantages.”
“Meanwhile, when we are growing up, realizing our dreams, and exploring ourselves, we are stepping closer to our ideality.”
Decaying might be a passive term, but it still all depends on how you would like to perceive it. I hope that everyone can be related to my feeling of growth.