The Poet

The work reimagines Shakespeare’s legendary visage, based on the seventeenth-century Chandos portrait, through the glowing petals of a purple lily. The flower, positioned before his blurred features, calls up the moral paradox that haunted Shakespeare’s poetry. In Sonnet 94, he says, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” transfiguring the symbol of purity into a sign of fragility and moral corruption.
Placed at the center of his face, the lily becomes a living veil that both conceals and reveals the poet. It replaces the mouth suggesting that art has taken the place of language, that art now speaks for J. Fun. The faint grid across the surface recalls the mediation of memory and technology, as if Shakespeare's likeness were being translated into data, preserved even as it fades. The bruised petals evoke endurance: desire and mortality persisting through time. This image neither idealizes nor erases him. The poet's voice dissolves into the flower's bloom, where beauty and decay coexist in fragile balance, a meditation on what it means for art to outlive its maker.