Distant Dialogues: SHII
To participate in the ‘Seeing Flowers’ project, please send different photos of indoor or outdoor flowers that capture your feelings at that moment. After collecting a set of photographs, Shii will compose a song out of her visual impression, and after this, she will rework the collected pictures and cooperate with a visual artist to make a 3D animation. Please submit photographs to dialogues@worldwidefm.net with the subject title ‘Flowers’.
SEEING FLOWERS
A song interacting with British audiences and a 3D animation derived from music and pictures, ‘Seeing Flowers’ regards itself as a British-Chinese musical project which collects images from UK web users in order to produce a compositions and 3D animation.
The flower theme of the project exists for several reasons. Shii is a Wuhan-based musician who works in a home studio and likes making flower arrangements at home. In Wuhan, the range of flowers that can be bought locally is limited, such that Shii sometimes goes online to buy fresh flowers delivered by airmail from Yunnan or even other countries, nevertheless she most often buys locally produced flowers. Shii has found that the flowers she gets from outside Wuhan, like German chamomiles and dwarf sunflowers, are also popular with other Chinese web users. This project aims to give Chinese people a glimpse of the different kinds of flowers British netizens like the most, under the dual effects of market factors and personal preferences, or simply what flowers they often see by the roadside and in flower shops. Meanwhile, flowers also have a secret language – a person’s choice of a kind of flower betrays a certain meaning, consciously or subconsciously, hence another aim of the work is to refine the meaning of different flowers in the eyes of British people and convert them into musical phrases or lyrics.
Flowers and music both convey beauty and can bring spiritual joy to people. We encourage users to also share their flowers on social media – when people share their flowers, they are also sharing beauty, a mood, and a lifestyle. The atmosphere or emotion conveyed by such visual beauty can be transformed into music, providing this project with an opportunity to conceive of or reproduce a British aesthetic concerning flowers.
ABOUT SHII
Shii is a Chengdu indie electronic artist currently residing in Wuhan, China. Her production draws elements from IDM, art-pop and dream-pop, merging them into catchy, fluent melodies. Shii has been invited to perform in Simple Life Festival, StreetVoice’s The Big Landing, Fete de la Musique and more. She signed with Beijing label Merrie Records in early 2019, and her debut Floating Signifiers” and EP record “Duration” were released in July and November 2019.