Sirui Zhang

Food and Funeral began with a disturbing moment during a meal. While eating grilled fish, I noticed wild fish swimming freely outside the window, which made me realise how easily death becomes invisible once an animal is transformed into food. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reflections on concealed slaughter, the project imagines a symbolic “funeral” for the animals we consume.

Through a series of animal-shaped vessels functioning simultaneously as tableware and urns, the work blurs the boundary between nourishment and mourning, inviting viewers to reconsider the lives hidden behind everyday acts of eating.

The project developed through the design of ten urn prototypes, each documented from both front and back views as part of an ongoing process of formal experimentation. Through iterative sketching and refinement, I explored variations in proportion, silhouette, and symbolic detail, gradually shaping vessels that operate as both functional objects and commemorative forms.

Alongside the ceramic designs, I produced a photographic book composed of funeral-like table arrangements in which the vessels appear as symbolic offerings. These staged images are contrasted with photographs of animals in their living, free states before death, creating a tension between vitality and consumption.

To further inform the work, I visited ceramic workshops in Jingdezhen to observe traditional techniques of hand-moulding, carving, and surface decoration. Through conversations with local artisans, I studied practices such as blue-and-white porcelain and underglaze painting, exploring how material, form, and colour are integrated within ceramic craft traditions. This field research directly influenced both the structural language and surface treatment of my own vessel designs.

In the final photographic series, real food associated with each animal was placed inside the corresponding vessels to heighten the sense of realism. The objects were arranged on black-draped tables alongside candles and plates to evoke the solemn atmosphere of a funeral ritual. For each animal, I also wrote a short mourning poem, combining image and text as a quiet act of tribute. A flip-through video was created to document the complete unfolding of the book.

In this project, I explore the hidden movement patterns of plants through animation. The work began from a curiosity about how plants respond to time, light, water, and internal biological forces—movements that are often too gradual or subtle to perceive in everyday life. Through hand-drawn animation and experimental motion design, I translate both microscopic and macroscopic plant activity into a poetic visual language.

Rather than pursuing scientific accuracy, the project focuses on emotional rhythm and sensory experience: how growth, transformation, and natural cycles can be felt through movement, timing, repetition, and flow. Nature is approached not as a static object of observation, but as a living system with its own tempo, pulse, and internal choreography.

The animation develops through a sequence of evolving organic forms. Aquatic plants twist gently through water before extending downward into soil, where seeds begin to grow upward in rhythmic, curving motions. Beneath the surface, microscopic activity inside the xylem reveals the hidden circulation systems that sustain outward expansion and life.

As the animation progresses, sunflowers emerge with pupil-like centres while petals and spiralling vines gradually accumulate across the frame, generating a sense of growth, density, and ascent. The imagery continuously expands and transforms, creating a visual rhythm that mirrors natural processes of propagation and change.

The work then moves through the cycle of the seasons. In spring, buds begin to appear; in summer, dense foliage glows with vitality and abundance. As autumn arrives, movement gradually slows and reverses: petals darken, leaves fade, and forms begin to collapse into the pale stillness of winter. In the final sequence, all organic structures dissolve into rippling abstract patterns, returning to the underlying rhythm and continuous flow of nature itself.

This project is inspired by hide and his concept of “LEMONed,” which redefines defectiveness and non-standard identities as sources of creativity, transformation, and collective belonging. Through music, fashion labels, retail spaces, and live performances, hide constructed a cross-media cultural ecosystem that offered emotional refuge and identity formation for non-mainstream communities.

As part of my research, I investigated the visual language of the Psyence album, the fashion objects associated with the LEMONed Shop, and the events organised under the LEMONed label. Together, these elements form a hybrid cultural environment in which music, fashion, performance, and self-expression intersect. This research became the conceptual foundation for my own imagined “Lemoned Space.”

The animation follows a girl who struggles to fit into society and remains trapped within a cocoon-like environment of isolation. When she hears Visual Kei rock music, her senses gradually awaken, and she develops a desire to escape. Guided by the melody, she rises upward along musical staves into a city slowly transformed by sound and colour.

Eventually, she arrives at the “Lemoned Music Utopia Space,” where music becomes a source of liberation, emotional release, and joy. Within this imagined world, she encounters a community of similarly marginalised individuals and forms connections through collective movement and dance. In the final scene, the figures merge together into a vibrant lemon, symbolising belonging, transformation, and shared identity. Through this journey, the protagonist completes her transition from loneliness and alienation toward connection and self-acceptance.