It was 2016. A white tulip sat on my table — its petals twisted and warped, bending away from the stem in directions a fresh flower never goes. Most people would have thrown it away. I reached for my camera.
That was the moment everything changed. Not because I planned it, not because I was looking for a new series. But because I saw something in that tulip that I had never quite seen before: the colours of a dying flower are completely different from those of a living one. The forms become stranger, more sculptural, more honest. A fresh tulip is beautiful. A wilting tulip is interesting.
The beauty most people miss
We live in a culture that is afraid of decay. We throw away flowers the moment they start to droop. We hide ageing, we retouch it, we apologise for it. But I have always been drawn to the other side of that instinct — the moment after the peak, when something reveals what it is truly made of.
In many Asian cultures, the relationship with transience is completely different. Decay is not failure — it is a stage of life, a carrier of wisdom and experience. A thing that has lived is a thing that knows. That idea has shaped my work profoundly. Travelling through Asia over the years as a commercial photographer, I kept encountering this perspective, and slowly it became my own.
A wilting flower has stood on a table. It has heard conversations, felt the light change, witnessed the small moments of a life. That gives it a kind of dignity a fresh flower hasn't yet earned.
The flower as hero
When I look through the viewfinder at a wilting flower, I feel two things simultaneously: calm and urgency. Calm because decay is slow and patient — it asks nothing of you. And urgency because I want to give this flower what it deserves: a pedestal. A moment of being truly seen.
That is what my photographs try to do. The flower is the protagonist — the hero. Despite its condition, or perhaps because of it, it is elevated. It is not a symbol of death. It is a symbol of a life fully lived.
What this means for the work on your wall
When collectors tell me that one of my prints has changed how they experience a room — that they find themselves stopping in front of it, looking again, finding something new — that is when I know the photograph has done its work. These are not decorations. They are small invitations to look at the world differently. To find the extraordinary in what you might otherwise walk past.
That white tulip in 2016 taught me that. I am still learning from it.