Flow by Nature

About Lean Lui

Lean Lui is a 19 years old self-taught Hong Kong photographer. Lean has been featured by media over the world, including Lomography (HK and USA), Velvet Eyes (Paris), Pocket Page Daily (Japan) and Neocha (China) and HK01 (HK). She sees photo-shooting as a way to build her own Utopia. Her works are sensitive, metaphoric, emotional and dreamy. ‘Flow By Nature’ in cafe 22 is Lean’s first solo exhibition. She takes this exhibition as a starting point of her self-discovering journey, as she said, ‘I am still learning and exploring.’

As the Chinese classic ‘Tao Te Ching’ said, ‘for I am abstracted from the world, the world from nature, nature from the way, and the way from what is beneath abstraction.’ (「人法地、地法天、天法道、道法自然。」—《道德經》). The ‘nature’ here does not mean trees, flowers or the sea, it is about ‘inaction’. That is why I have been exploring the relationship between humans and nature. The more I explored, the more similarities I unearthed. What strikes me the most is that the liveliness of nature.

I believe that the humans and nature share the same destiny. A lot of people have a feeling that elements like water and light will disappear in a flash, but this ‘flash’ is a relative notion, based on different perceptions. Everything in the world is correlated and inter-connected.
The leading sentence of 「人法地、地法天、天法道、道法自然。」is ‘they are the greatest of all, and man is one of the four.’ (「域中四大，人居其一。」). It means neither man nor nature is superior to the other.

We cannot control the time of the sunrise and sunset like we cannot control the circle of life. It is a natural pattern. When it comes to human, we tend to romanticise a lot of things and fill them with stories. For me, however, all elements primarily are the same.

There is an ancient Japanese saying, ‘the best flower is the cherry blossom, the best individual is the samurai.’ (「花は桜、人は侍」). I am deeply affected by this Japanese aesthetic: rather short glamour than long-lived ugliness. The Japanese love Sakura, a flower species which has a one-week lifespan. After that week, Sakura will wither. Japanese see this ‘moment of wither’ as the ‘ultimate beauty’. I think the ‘blossom period’ of people is short, especially for women. But it doesn’t matter as long as we can present our most flamboyant gestures. That is much better than a long-lived bleak life.

These concepts apply throughout the series, as a whole.