Unfinished Bloom

Che-Yu Wu has been writing generative flowers for years. In June 2024 his daily sketches turned to a run of flowers, daisies, sunflowers, poppies, violets and spider lilies, their strokes moving from noise through watercolour to the texture of oil paint, and he later rewrote the brush engine once more for The Coffee Dreamscape. As the system grew more precise and the flowers more lifelike, he said in an interview on 14 April 2026, the realisation came like the invention of photography: the more closely mathematics and physics computed a flower, the more of its original flavour was lost.

He turned back to Van Gogh. In the Impressionists the flowers come apart, a brushstroke stays a brushstroke, and sometimes the strokes gather into a flower more abstract and more whole. He tuned the system of Unfinished Bloom towards this: petals are built stroke by stroke, each stroke trembles around its own path and towards the end scatters and leaps away, so that whole flowers and scattered strokes share the picture at once.

The computer in the gallery runs a web program written in p5.js and WebGL, held full-screen by Electron and fed through a splitter to four projectors that blend into one 7680 × 1200 picture across three walls. The picture has fifteen layers of depth: at the bottom a cloud of strokes like a city, each layer above drifting slowly on its own, the flowers sharpest in front and softening towards the back. Flowers emerge from the dark, staggered over the first twenty seconds, each flower slightly shifted in hue from the next.

Six kinds of flower take turns: spider lily, a many-coloured flower, poppy, violet, sunflower and white daisy, several of them transplanted from his daily sketches of 2024. At the end of each round the picture fades out over a second and a half and the next kind grows back out of the dark. According to the work statement, the colours are swatches taken from thirty groups of elements associated with New Taipei. In the program green was removed, because green flowers looked wrong. Sound runs in a separate window, so the music does not break when the picture regrows, looping three of his own pieces, Summer Migration, The Bull and the Sudden Rain and Blue Horizon. There are no sensors in the room. The flowers do not change because someone walks in; only time changes them.