In blossom

This article was originally published on Neocha and is republished with permission.

People are multilayered, and no two individuals are the same. This also stands true when it comes to flowers, and it became the line of thinking that sparked the idea for Chinese artist Zeng Siqin’s Flower: Portraits of Personality. The project features different forms of floral life, and they were all created based on computer-generated palettes matched up with different personalities. It all began with a question: “Is there way to give shape and form to human nature?”

With this question as the starting point, she found inspiration from the likes of Xiang Fan and Laurie Frick, data artists whose works offered a eureka moment: data can presented in beautiful, visually engaging ways.

Using WeChat, China’s most popular form of social media, Si invited strangers to take part in a personality survey, creating a database of personalities that she then organized, analyzed, and assigned with ratings. Feeding this information into a program that she designed specifically for this project, the algorithm churned out different colors based on each participant’s personalities.

As for the visual motif that would serve as the vessel for this data, that took a lot of deliberation. She eventually settled on flowers. “When we talk about someone’s personality, it’s easy to generalize,” she explains. “It’s either you have a bad personality or you have a good personality, but it’s not this black and white. Everyone is unique and I believe there’s no set standards to judge someone by. It’s like flowers, they come in all shapes and forms, but it’s hard to objectively say whether one is more beautiful than another.”

Flowers are also often viewed in a positive light, and Si believes that these positive connotations are very much in line with the message she wanted to convey about human personality. “The main theme of my art is about the kindness of men,” she says. “Everyone is a flower in their own right. No matter the personality, humans bloom into their own and add color to the world. Because of every person’s existence, the world is brighter. Everyone should feel confident about themselves.”

This optimistic outlook can perhaps be traced back to her teenager years, where the encouragement of her parents and teachers set her off on the path of art. Si was taught traditional Chinese painting at a young age, but she only pursued it as a hobby. Making art was hardly anything of lasting interest. In her sophomore year of high school, Si’s mom decided to send her off to Changsha with her brother to finish her studies, but the school didn’t have an art course. She decided to attend art classes outside of school once a week. As time went on, her artistic abilities caught the attention of her teacher. “He said that I had a talent and that he was sure I had the potential to go to Tsinghua University’s art program one day,” Si recalls. “But I still wasn’t really interested in it at the time.”

Surprisingly, another teacher further encouraged her to follow her artistic talents. This support was what gave Si a change of heart, and consider art as a viable path. For her, switching her main area of study to art with only one year left to the Chinese national exams was a road paved with difficulties. Her parents stood with her every step of the way.

She eventually landed a spot at Tsinghua University, which hosts China’s most sought-after art program. There, she completed a graduate degree before heading overseas to further her studies at the Tokyo University of Arts. This trajectory might make it seem like her success came without hindrance, but this isn’t the case. Even with her academic success, self-doubt kept creeping in.

She often questioned herself: “Am I truly an artist?”

This doubt is actually nothing new. It’s a question that’s popped up in her head time and time again throughout her six years of art studies. Although she excelled academically, she didn’t feel like she was a particularly gifted artist. “Exams at art school are just practice for technical skills,” Si says. “It’s about building a foundation, but we’re not really creating art. I hadn’t drawn anything of my own in a long time, and exams are just about drilling repetitive knowledge.”

Si says that these methods may sometimes feel detrimental to true artistic development. There is a certain energy and spirit to artistic creation, which she believes can’t be taught. “To a certain extent, art school and exams may even stifle creativity,” she says.

To her, there are major differences between a “creator” and an artist. To be classified as the former, they must have a strong concept or emotion, and that must be passed on to viewers. “To be an artist, the work must facilitate an open dialogue between artist and audience, one that’s spiritually resonant,” Zeng says. “It must also come with a sense of originality, and the work must be creatively fulfilling.”

To her, Flower: Portraits of Personality meets a number of these criteria. There were a lot of hurdles to overcome in achieving her vision though. “It was hard to make everything cohesive because there was so much I wanted to include,” she recalls. “I had to think about how to solicit the personality data, how to quantify it, how to turn that data into a floral motif, and how these images would be presented. These were just some of the issues I had to keep in work out.”

A pragmatic approach was her earliest method. Collecting and analyzing the data were the first steps, and, surprisingly, was one of the most enjoyable parts of the project for her. She surveyed people using the Big Five personality traits, a theory that identified five factors of an individual’s personality to form a picture of their personality. This system scores a person based on their openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This method-driven approach seemed to make the most sense at the time, but little attention was given to how the data could be shown in more interesting ways.

“It was all about expression!” Zeng says. “I thought it was enough to have a strong theme in a piece of artwork, so I didn’t think about how to make it even more visually expressive. ”

This methodology was criticized by her teacher at the time. “He said I was too logical, and that artworks should not be so rigid. He said this isn’t scientific research; this is art, and that art should focus a lot on visual expression,” she recalls. “It was more important to work from the heart.”