Garden of Mirrored Flowers

Chinese, 13 x 21 cm, Vitamin Creative Space, 2009, 148 Pages, ISBN 978-988-17864-7-0

Begun from the pictorial journey of different kinds of ad materials which indicate the different entries into reality, the story creates a protagonist who is involved in the process of designing a theme park called Jin Hua Yuan (镜花园Garden of Mirrored Flowers), and is a transformation of the Chinese classical novel Jin Hua Yuan ( 镜花缘The Predestination of Mirrored Flowers) from Qing dynasty. There are parallel lines between the construction in reality and in the imagination of how a garden has evolved within an historic process. The story ends up in a big opening ceremony of the theme park where history seems to have been completely consumed and absorbed by contemporary social movement.

For Hu Fang, reality in China is so dramatic that it seems that reality itself is writing its own novel, “probably it’s the book written by a ghost writer, me? just a traveler floating within the
wave of globalization.”

When reality has already become commodity, The Garden of Mirrored Flowers is a labyrinth to be lost in, or a pavilion made by semi-reflective glass (like Dan Graham has made) which reflects self-images, precisely because we are situated within a reality replete with multiple routes.