I Can Buy Myself Flowers
Featuring selections from the DRAT Collection
Group Exhibition, Curated by Tan Siuli
6 to 17 Aug 2025, 11am—7pm
Titled after the lyrics of a pop song celebrating independence and self-sufficiency, I Can Buy Myself Flowers brings together works drawn from a private collection and focused on the subject of flowers. Floral imagery has a long and illustrious art history, and artists throughout time have been captivated by their universal language of beauty, emotion and meaning. To bring together an exhibition focused on this singular theme is hence an opportunity to consider the myriad approaches to the same subject, and how the simple motif of the flower can encapsulate the complexities of human experience and artistic expression across time, cultures and contexts.
With works spanning the impressionist period, modern masters, and some of the most exciting names shaping art today, I Can Buy Myself Flowers offers a glimpse into a multiplicity of biographies and ways of viewing the self and the world, even as individual works echo or pay homage to others, and to art history.
Maurice de Vlaminck’s still life continues the long history of this genre but his loose brushwork imbues his subject with a sense of flux, flying in the face of classical painting conventions of permanence and fixity, and a nod to the Impressionist obsession with capturing shifting light – and by extension, the transience of life, vision and matter. Sanam Khatibi’s botanical arrangement echoes this darker palette and sentiment, recalling both the vanitas paintings of the Dutch golden age as well as the sensuous meticulousness of Persian miniature painting. In her still life, we catch a glimpse of the savagery of the natural world, under the polished veneer of beauty, order and control. Clare Woods’s lush bouquets turn on a similar latent tension, her energetic, visceral brushstrokes contrasting with the inevitable decay of her subject matter. In her words, “the idea of a vase of flowers represents a life span, in a tiny environment”. Woods’s vivid, expressive paintings may be read as a rage against the dying of the light, and a reaffirmation of life, joy, and pleasure.
While flowers are celebrated and enjoyed for their beauty and fulsome lushness, they can also be poignant intimations of loss. Iranian-American artist Rosha Yaghmai’s vivid blooms float adrift against a glassy pool of black, a nod towards the legacy of Monet’s ethereal waterlilies as well as a haunting metaphor for un-rooting – the spectral traces of a ‘phantom land’ that the artist has left behind. In a similar vein, the delight in Bianca Raffaella’s lush and textured florals is tempered by the knowledge that the artist is partially sighted; her resplendent visions share a kinship with the near-abstract paintings that Monet produced when his eyes were clouded by cataracts, and their fleeting beauty is also the ache of a brief and momentary joy that we all too often take for granted.
Two immigrant artists draw on the image and idea of the garden as a means to express delight and anxiety respectively. With a nod to the joie devivre of Matisse’s paintings as well as the vivid acrylics of Pop Art, Walasse Ting’s “My Garden” is a sensuous field of colour, a profusion of unbridled joy that admits no hints of the turbulent times he lived through. Ting’s work is a foil for Paul Anthony Smith’s equally vibrant garden, but Smith’s is one that is out of reach and encircled with a chain-link fence – a sombre reference to the lived experiences of black émigrés in America.
Another émigré artist, Liu Dan chose to eschew the hardships of the Cultural Revolution in his homeland, electing instead to celebrate in his art the great traditions of east and west, bringing these together in his inimitable synthesis of drawing, ink painting and calligraphy. In its references to Van Gogh -- both in choice of subject matter as well as a quotation from one of Van Gogh’s letters -- Liu’s work expresses a keen desire to be regarded amongst (artistic) peers. In a similar fashion, Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s painting turns on citations, cannily marrying the minimalism of Agnes Martin’s visual fields with evocations of the void or negative space in traditional Chinese landscape painting. With a deft hand and a light touch, Wang playfully punctuates registers of the transcendental and profound with seemingly misplaced quotidian observations, revealing her fluency in the visual language of the Chinese literati as well as that of the contemporary avant-garde.
About the Artist(s)
Bianca RAFFAELLA
b. 1992, U.K.
Bianca Raffaella is a British artist and activist working between London and Margate. Drawing from memory and sensory impressions rather than direct observation, Raffaella creates ethereal floral and figurative paintings that reflect her lived experience as a partially sighted individual. Her work draws viewers into her world shaped by capturing fleeting moments suspended in “persistent vision,” where her sight is in constant motion, and images appear only briefly as faint shadows or flickers of light.
Her ongoing series of textured flower paintings evoke the artist’s experience of beauty in braille, Raffaella's ongoing series of textural flower paintings evoke the artist’s experience of beauty in braille, which was how she first learned to read and write. Her painting process relies on touch, never losing contact with the canvas at all times. She blends delicate hues of blue, beige, and dusty pink until they become an ethereal impression as cloudy details are made with fingertips, brushstrokes or scrapes of a palette knife.
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Rosha YAGHMAI
b. 1978, U.S.
Through a sculptural practice that melds industrial and craft processes, Rosha Yaghmai’s work utilizes these provocations to alter the familiar. Working with materials like silicone, resin, plaster, and fiberglass, the artist juxtaposes soft, flesh-like surfaces with rigid forms to create objects that feel simultaneously bodily and architectural. Her assemblages, in exhibition format, often evoke thresholds, through the use of architectural structures like gates, doorways, and courtyard walls, that gesture toward metamorphosis, transcendence, and estrangement. Deeply influenced by her first-generation upbringing in Southern California, Yaghmai’s work reflects a layered relationship to place, identity, and the disorientating echoes of cultural inheritance.
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Paul Anthony SMITH
b. 1988, Jamaica
Paul Anthony Smith’s layered practice spans painting and picotage on pigment prints, drawing from personal history and broader themes of identity across the African diaspora. Referencing W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness and Frantz Fanon’s writings on cultural dislocation under colonialism, Smith constructs visual narratives that are both intimate and political. His works often obscure figures behind intricate picotage patterns inspired by Caribbean breeze block fences and modernist architecture—structures that serve simultaneously as barriers and protective screens. In doing so, Smith complicates photography’s traditional role as a revelatory medium, instead using it to question who is seen, how, and by whom.
Smith’s images resist easy legibility, inviting viewers to navigate layers of visibility, migration, and memory. At once celebratory and unsettling, his portraits and landscapes reflect hybrid identities and the complex legacy of the post-colonial Caribbean - where borders are not just physical, but also psychological and cultural.
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LIU Dan
b. 1953, China
Liu Dan is widely regarded as a leading figure in contemporary Chinese ink painting, known for his synthesis of classical techniques with Western artistic influences. One of the first Chinese artists to emigrate to the United States in the early 1980s, Liu was the foremost proponent of neo-Song, photo-realism in contemporary Chinese painting. His meticulous renderings of landscapes, scholar’s rocks, or ancient trees in the Forbidden City are not just mere representations of nature, but philosophical meditations on material and metaphysical reality.
Liu Dan’s process, beginning with rigorous draftsmanship and culminating in expressive brushwork using traditional Chinese ink and paper, echoes the discipline of old-master drawing. For the artist, realism is not simply visual accuracy, but a means of revealing nature’s unfolding essence, or what he describes as “folds” in material reality. Realism, thus deployed, offers a contemplative intersection of both the material and metaphysical process of forming.
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Walasse TING
b. 1929, China
Xiongquan Diang, better known as Walasse Ting, was a Chinese-American artist renowned for his vibrant and colourful depictions of women, animals, flowers, and other elements of nature. Informed by Chinese calligraphy techniques, Ting nurtured his talent painting on sidewalks as a youth in Shanghai. After a brief stint in Paris in the early 1950s, where he became associated with the CoBrA movement, whose emphasis on spontaneity left a lasting impression on him - the artist moved to New York City, in 1957, and was exposed to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, which further influenced and shaped his mature style.
By the 1970s, Ting developed the distinctive style he is best known for today, using Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes to define forms and filling them with bright, flat acrylic colors. His works radiate freshness, vitality, and brilliant colour, capturing a magical and seductive world full of sensory pleasure.
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Maurice de VLAMINCK
b. 1876, France
A leading figure of the Fauvist movement, Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris in 1876 to a family of musicians. Though trained in violin and piano, he discovered a passion for painting in his teens and began studying privately under artist Henri Rigalon. Alongside Henri Matisse and André Derain, Vlaminck helped define the bold and expressive aesthetic of Fauvism; a short-lived but pivotal movement in early 20th-century modern art known for its vivid, non-naturalistic use of colour.
His early works are marked by the intense hues and expressive brushwork that earned the Fauves their nickname, "wild beasts." Influenced by Van Gogh’s emotive energy and later by Cézanne’s structural clarity, Vlaminck’s palette and forms gradually evolved, darkening and solidifying after 1908. Throughout, he remained committed to a visceral and emotive approach to painting, rejecting academic conventions in favour of immediacy and feeling.
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Sanam KHATIBI
b. 1979, Iran
Sanam Khatibi creates symbolically charged paintings that probe the complex relationship between power, desire, and human nature. Drawing from a wide range of art historical sources, including the Bayeux Tapestry and pre-Columbian art to the dreamlike compositions of Hieronymus Bosch and Frida Kahlo, Khatibi’s work blends instinct and mythology into rich visual allegories. Amid fantastical, verdant landscapes populated by exotic creatures, Khatibi sets human figures who engage in scenes of pleasure and violence, indulgence and restraint. She appeals to primal instinct and artistic tradition, expressing emotional ambiguity and contradiction.
Devoid of cultural signifiers, these figures become universal - and altogether, Khatibi’s canvases raise questions about the relationship between impulse and control.
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Evelyn Taocheng WANG
b. 1981, China
Evelyn Taocheng Wang works across painting, calligraphy, video, installation, performance, and fashion, bringing together a “constellation” of influences that span traditional Chinese aesthetics, contemporary art history, queer theory, feminism, and colonial narratives. Her practice is one of deliberate hybridity, where cultural, temporal, and conceptual frameworks are layered and entangled. Wang moves fluidly between forms and references, arriving at a personal visual language that integrates and interconnects these seemingly autonomous notions.
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Clare WOODS
b. 1972, U.K.
Hovering between abstraction and figuration, Clare Woods’ visceral paintings are defined by fluid mark-making and vibrant colours. Originally trained as a sculptor, Woods brings a sculptural sensitivity to the surface of her paintings, exploring the tension between physical form and painterly gesture in two-dimensional space. Her work draws from a wide range of influences, from Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth to Marlene Dumas and Wolfgang Tillmans, destabilising traditional genres such as landscape, portraiture, and still life.
Themes such as beauty, mortality, and loss underpin her practice. Woods’ compositions evolve from an archive holding thousands of found and personal photographs. Using instinctive, free-flowing brushstrokes, Woods defamiliarises her source imagery by breaking them down into their formal elements.