Beyond FLowers

Creation Time: 2025 Size: 64x40x20cm Material: Dried Flowers, Lightbox

In the Chinese language, the word “beyond” (bi an) carries a layered duality. On one level, it refers to distant geographies: a faraway land, a foreign shore, a world across the ocean. But on another, more metaphysical level, it points to an otherworldly realm—the land of the departed, the afterlife.

The primary material used in this work—dried flowers—mirrors this dual meaning. A dried flower is, after all, a blossom that has withered and died, yet it retains the vivid color and lingering fragrance of its once-living form. It becomes a kind of spiritual remnant, a poetic residue of beauty after the death of the body. At the same time, all these dried flowers were sourced from Amazon, but manufactured entirely in China. Each packet bears the label “MADE IN CHINA”—a quiet detail that, for Song Jianshu living in the United States, marks them quite literally as flowers from beyond.

But beyond this wordplay lies a reflection of deeper global tensions. In this era of globalization, the world's largest consumer nation and the world’s largest manufacturing power are entangled in a fragile balance of economic interdependence and political negotiation. The artist observes that today’s American Dream is, in many ways, built upon the foundation of Made in China. And the fulcrum of global trade is also the fulcrum of countless personal fates. As the balance tips—unpredictably, unstably—what once bloomed beautifully may become brittle and lifeless. Like these dehydrated flowers, many lives become the quiet price of a dazzling, transient prosperity.