The Lover’s Eye was never just a portrait. It was a portrait of a gaze. The art of looking back.

For the #FLORAMuseumChallenge, I chose the 19th-century Lover’s Eye Bracelet, an intimate object featuring a miniature of a loved one’s eye. Pieces like these were worn close to the body so the wearer could imagine their beloved’s gaze resting upon them 👁️

That idea became my creative starting point: what if the gaze that we see in art could be returned?

So I imagined a woman walking through present-day New York wearing the bracelet. As we get closer to the miniature, we find "Ivy" actually looking out from her own time. The person preserved inside the object is suddenly looking back at us, creating a fleeting exchange between past and present.

The engraved name “Ivy” on the back of the actual bracelet became a small but meaningful detail that helped me imagine the story behind the object.

And so I wanted to create something that felt like a visual poem 💛 A gaze captured centuries ago, finding its way back to another pair of eyes.

wow. Love the idea!!

THE WOMEN LEAVE. THE SEALS STAY. 只是朱顏改

After Zhou Wenju, In the Palace. Song dynasty copy, before 1140. The Met, Open Access. Original: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40004 Canvas: https://app.flora.ai/projects/ns72hzhvj0sysrbq51ew51cgy18dnpjh

Zhou Wenju was court painter to Li Yu, the last emperor of Southern Tang. These are the women of his palace. When the Song armies took his kingdom, Li Yu was carried into captivity, and there he wrote the ci poem 虞美人 for the palace he would never see again: 雕欄玉砌應猶在，只是朱顏改. The carved railings and jade steps must still be there. Only the faces have changed.

That line is the whole film. I let the women come to life in their own ink lines and walk out of the painting, one by one, until only the empty silk remains. Everything he named as lasting stays: the weave, the stains, and the red seals of the men who owned the scroll for a thousand years. Only the people are gone. His grief as a fallen emperor was that the walls outlive the people inside them, and the painting now does exactly that. One guqin note falls for each woman who leaves.

The closing couplet is not a font. Every character is 集字, collected one by one from brush originals, the way the Tang monk Huairen built the 聖教序 from Wang Xizhi's own hand. Nine of the twelve come from stone-stele collections of Wang Xizhi (集王聖教序, 興福寺半截碑, 普覺國師碑). The three he never wrote, 雕 欄 砌, are borrowed from Zhao Mengfu and Wen Zhengming, who both spent their lives learning his line.

Made in FLORA. #floramuseumchallenge — Lois Liao / Oni On

wow how can i learn that!!