City College of San Francisco student, Cece Chen, has made their artistic debut, bringing murals to life through flowers and fashion.
The 26-year-old UC Berkeley graduate, a climate data scientist who is in their first semester in the college's Environmental Horticulture & Floristry Department, was thrilled to have their work displayed inside the de Young Museum for this year’s Bouquets to Art exhibit.
“This career has taught me to appreciate more of the beauty that goes on in the world around us, and I think floristry was just an interest of mine that overlaps with that, and I just wanted to try something new,” Chen said.
The annual fundraising event for the Auxiliaries of the Fine Arts Museum opens its doors for City College students to create floral fashion pieces based on art in the de Young collection. Through this semester’s Introduction to Floral Design course, Chen, participated in the Bouquets to Art show with project partners Anna Jiang and Brianna Ang.
The trio crafted a midi strapless dress, headpiece and parasol for the week-long exhibit that was inspired by the Teotihuacan mural “Feathered Serpents and Flowering Trees” and used a mix of flowers that were native to where the mural was found and flowers that were similar in color and shape to the art depicted in the mural. On opening night, which took place on March 3, Chen also modeled in the dress.
“I think that people should push themselves to do more creative things because I am not that creative of a person naturally, and I think this was a great opportunity to be more creative,” Chen said.
The Ingleside Light caught up with Chen to hear more about their design for Bouquets to Art.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did it feel to see your work displayed and to be a part of something like Bouquets to Art?
Very surreal. Even two months ago, I could not have imagined doing something like this, and today, to be able to have done something like this, to be so out of my comfort zone, and to push myself to do something like this, I'm speechless about this whole opportunity and experience. To be able to work alongside Anna and Brianna, who have been so amazing to also learn from and work together with, struggle together, learn about you know the inner workings of how to make a floral dress, I think that's all been so eye-opening and such a great learning experience.
How did you guys decide on using the “Feathered Serpents and Flowering Trees” mural?
We really like the message it was going with. It felt easier to connect with and also see how this mural would also somewhat tie in line with the timing of Bouquets to Art, since it's kind of the beginning of spring, the beginning of new life. The mural kind of conveyed this meaning to us, and so that made it easy to wrap the dress design around that message to be like, “OK, how do we continue to promote the idea that life creates other life, water is creating life? How can we show that?”
What was the hardest part of the project?
The hardest part was figuring out how closely aligned we were going to be to our initial designs. How do we balance the idea of having a dress very connected to the mural versus something that represents something else on its own as a dress? Because I think what we realized through the iterations of designing this dress is that our initial designs were, in the end, pretty different from what you see. We had very similar messaging of a serpent wrap and flowers on the bottom half of the dress, but the way it turned out had to slowly change over time as we learned about what would be visually more appealing than the initial design. What makes more sense with what flowers make more sense with what's in bloom? How can we make sure that the flowers don't die so quickly when they're in a very warm, dry environment like the de Young?
I think the initial design, we had a lot more flowers and a much more randomized pattern.
They were kind of imagined in clusters instead of these cascades that you see in the dress now. We actually put the dress together on Saturday, the night before Bouquets to Art, as the original design. At the end of Saturday night, we realized we didn't like it. We put a lot of work in, but we just did not feel that excited or proud of it at the end and so Sunday we spent a lot of time just redoing the dress because what we realized from the initial designs is like translating that
design to reality was inherently going to have some disconnect and so we had to like think about how to have more structure in the design. Instead of these clusters, how do we make a similar cascading effect with the flowers? How can we make sure your eyes are taken to the focal points of the flowers rather than distracted by a lot of other things going on in the dress?
What is the significance of creating art in this format?
The importance of this kind of art is that I think it has so much life. I think almost everybody enjoys flowers to some degree, and I think everybody can appreciate how beautiful flowers have been created just through nature, and I think this type of art, this like floral fashion art, really like hones in on that beauty and says like how can we create something more than what you typically see with a bouquet or like a few flowers? How can we make something that has movement to it as well? How can we put people within these dresses so that they are a part of this floral design as well? It really, it allows the piece to have more life because somebody's in it, but also it allows people to appreciate how many flowers there are, how so many flowers can be put together in such a way that allows your eyes to just be popped with so much creativity, so much color.
I think something that's also very unique about this type of floral fashion design is that the dress has life, and it also has death. A lot of our pieces will kind of like once they're created they sit as they are and they continue that way but these floral dresses are made of real flowers that do that because they're all cut they will die and so if you see the dress over time you can kind of see how it slowly starts to die in certain ways and that also adds like a little more depth or different perspective to the dress as well because now you're seeing how like this beauty is not forever. You really have to enjoy it when it's blooming, and it is still very enjoyable as it's dying as well, because the dress continues to look different. The art continues to change over time. Naturally, the art will change and has different parts of it that you can appreciate.
What is one piece of advice you have for someone who wants to participate in Bouquets to Art or follow a creative path similar to yours?
I think you should take classes at CCSF Floristry Department, and I think then you’ll have the opportunity to participate in Bouquets to Arts. Also, just take the class to push your creative outlet. The class itself is such a great creative outlet to really push that muscle because every week you’re making a new kind of arrangement, and for myself, by week two, we ran out of arrangements that I've done in my life. Everything we’ve been working on is something maybe I’ve seen but never really understood, and now every week we see [Professor] Steven [Brown] put a bouquet together, and then we have to do it ourselves afterwards. It’s such a learning process and a challenging process to work these muscles you don’t usually work.
