The Flower of the Other Shore

Over the first half of June 2024 Che-Yu Wu wrote a run of flower sketches, all of them inside the code base of his Starbucks commission. On 3 June, 3D Particle Collider set particles colliding in three-dimensional space; the next day the same code grew the first coffee tree, followed by Flowers 2 to 7: a sunflower, a daisy, a layer system, and on 12 June a brush system. Two days later came the spider lilies, and three days after that the same brushwork painted Coffee Tree v1, the start of what became The Coffee Dreamscape.

In an interview in September 2026 he walked through the path himself: first the gradients of the petals were made to look like oil paint, then came the sunflowers, the strokes shaking as they rendered, and the furthest point of the series was The Flower of the Other Shore.

The work is named after the red spider lily, but in the exhibition the flowers were not always red. Each time the exhibited version grows again, it draws one colour from red, white, blue, yellow and purple. Red is on the list twice, so roughly one time in three the flowers are red. The five images below are the same random seed at the same instant, with only the colour changed.

From 12 December 2024 to 2 January 2025, Eternal Floral Realm was shown in a black box on the ground floor of Building 1 at Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Diamond Towers, organised by LG and VML, with The Flower of the Other Shore at its centre. MONOLAB’s creative director Wade Zhu added two mirrored walls and a rippling water projection on the floor, and set three LG OLED screens together at offset angles. Each screen shows its own crop of one large picture, the crops staggered against each other, so that it is like looking at a single field of flowers through three windows, and the mirrors push it on until no end can be seen.

The room was run by a 140-second timeline in TouchDesigner, with the sound of waves and wind laid into it. In the flower passage the field grows again every ten to seventeen seconds, eight times a cycle, in a colour drawn at random each time, while the view moves closer and further away. The music is his own, the piece he would release as The Other Shore of Dreams. The outer wall and the screen at the entrance showed a different work, Colorful Flowers.

In the weeks around the opening he was on a residency in Paris. The day before the opening he updated the exhibition’s code remotely from Paris, and on opening day the installation went in with him watching remotely. He returned to Taiwan on 21 December and walked into the room for the first time on the afternoon of the 23rd. He later described the space on a podcast: “as if glowing, eternal flowers were growing out of the void.”

The music in the room is a piece Che-Yu Wu wrote on 4 November 2024, saved under the file name 241104 彼岸花 v2. The same day he posted it on StreetVoice as The Other Shore of Dreams, with a short poem, and in 2025 released it on streaming platforms. He has said that every song he wrote in that period was a diary of the time.

After the exhibition the flowers went into his concerts. On 31 May and 7 June 2025, the third chapter of Algorithmic Poetry: The Boundary of Dreams and Solitude at Huashan 1914 Creative Park covered four walls and the floor with a recording of the spider lilies, set to The Other Shore of Dreams. In July 2026 it returned in Algorithmic Poetry: The Meridian of Light at Le Méridien Taipei Banqiao. On 31 August 2026 he put the work on its own web address, and the same night made a light-field version, asking that “the painterly quality of the brush structure be kept, but drawn in a 3D world.”