YingYing Li

The Death of An Eternal Iris is inspired by the memory of the artist’s late grandmother, combining photography and drawing, with the iris symbolising the presence of being within the infinite. The starting point for the project was a desire to explore the idea of infinity, as articulated in Immanuel Kant’s first antinomy from the Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

The work examines how being is perceived, mourned, and remembered through forms that resist linear temporality—both present and absent. A series of wall-based photographs depicts a vase of irises captured under shifting light as they gradually wilt over several days. These images are intertwined with drawing as a way of accessing and deconstructing multiple dimensions of time and space. Points and lines are formed by the motion of particles intersecting and overlapping in complex assemblies.