Home, Melted Home. Love, Double Love

Still life photography is my way of being with things. Everyday objects meet jewellery by mEltEd potato, forming new connections in a shifting image-space where love is no longer a single event, but can be generated, transferred, and reactivated.

For me, still life photography has always been a way of being with things. I collect everyday objects and let them come into proximity, test each other, even fall in love. I then stage and photograph these relationships to hold onto them. In this collaboration with Taiwanese jewellery designer mEltEd potato, I bring her fluid, warm, almost bodily jewellery into the scenes I construct and photograph. When my objects meet her pieces, new connections and emotions begin to form, gradually growing into a breathing, shifting image-space where “love” is no longer a single event, but a state that can be repeatedly generated, transferred, and reactivated.

The process is grounded in our friendship and unfolds like an improvised jam session. Through gestures of offering and responding, the images emerge through rhythm, deviation, and uncertainty, much like jazz moving between structure and freedom. As objects are repeatedly arranged, dismantled, and reassembled, they begin to detach from their original functions and timelines, entering an ambiguous space between reality and dream.

In one work, a hat made by pillow walk carries two key elements. The phrase “Confusing reality with dreams” reflects our everyday conversations and the blurred state we inhabit while making. The image of Taipei 101 on the same hat becomes a quiet but grounded symbol. Amid fluidity and transformation, there remains a desire for stability and support, a hope that love can be as strong and upward-reaching as this city landmark.

Within this image-space, jewellery, as objects that touch the body, holds traces of memory and intimacy, while everyday items act as fragments of emotion, pulled and rearranged into new narrative constellations. Love, in this process, repeats, delays, and transforms; it moves between objects and leaves echoes across layers of time. Each recomposition becomes an attempt to love again, both a return to what remains and an opening toward what has yet to happen. The image thus becomes a continuously moving emotional field, where viewers may project, recognize, and re-experience how love is formed and set in motion.