rose is a rose is a rose

CHUNG HEE-SEUNG (B.1974): Untitled #08, #02,#14, and 06 from the series ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE  at Perigee Gallery. 

Archival pigment print, 78x108cm, 2016.

I photographed as many roses as possible during my last summer in London. A row of Teasing Georgias (if memory serves me right) at Kew Gardens seemed to be in their last days. A bee slept in the middle of a yellow blossom still in bloom.  I smiled at a lady who seemed to be as equally enchanted as me by the blossoms. We began talking about roses. I told her that photographing the flowers brought me joy, but mostly sadness because rose season is too brief. Petals fade and fall, blooms blister, their faces are cast down. Even in London, there didn’t seem to be enough rain for them that year. The tragic part is that summer decay is beautiful.

Her voice was bright and her response was cheerful: “But, ah. Each season a rose blooms twice." Look here, she held out her hand to a small bud hidden in the shadow. "You still have one more bloom to enjoy before the summer ends, and of course, they’ll be here every summer season thereafter.”

The following week, a rain shower brought me to a rose garden in Maida Vale.  Some rosebushes were as tall as me. A tree overhead provided a canopy. Every now and then a few gentle drops landed on my hands and face. I thought of the lady from Kew Garden’s antidote for the first of many times.

An image of a rose can be cliché, but every now and again I find one that seems as if it was the first picture of a rose that I have ever seen. An image from Chung Hee-Seung's series,  Rose is a Rose is a Rose made its way to me Sunday morning. I don’t know much about this artist except that she is a photographer who studied art in Seoul, South Korea and London. Her images are timely in that they are minimal, devised, and still, but there is something about her eye that makes her images serene rather than generic.  I hope to see her work in real life and not just through a screen.

In this series which was shown at, Her blooms are removed from any garden. Stems stand tall, in front of a mint-blue backdrop. Her blooms are graphic, but not sterile. Look closely, there are the same faded petals that I recognized as beautiful one summer.