We've all seen flowers beautifully displayed in our local market or flower shop, but never have we seen them exploding like this! Qi Wei is not a botanist but a curious photographer who, one day, came across Todd McLellan's Disassembly series. It got him thinking.
“Todd McLellan's Disassembly shows a wonderful different viewpoint of man-made objects which inspired me to think if it could be applied to the natural world,” Wei tells us. “Of course, the incredibly ordered world of flowers lend itself to this technique wonderfully. My layout is slightly different in that I try to show (as far as possible) the relative positions of the petals, stamens and pistils with each other so that the radial symmetry is preserved and the flower is recognizable, but only just so.”
What did he learn from this experiment? “What is intriguing is how much surface area flowers with multiple petals can pack in them,” he says. “Even so, the flowers with less petals (like the lily) have a nice simplicity that makes a different image.”
Lily
Carnation
Chrysanthemum
Orange Gerbera
Peruvian Lily
Red Rose #1
Red Rose #2
Untitled Purple Flower
Sunflower
“Petals, stamens and pistils are really like the individual brush strokes of nature, actual physical brush strokes that can be picked up and admired.”
