About
Brenda Lee is a Singapore-based artist and floral designer whose practice investigates the life cycle of flowers from spectacle to afterlife.
With over three decades of experience in the luxury wedding industry as founder of Fiore Dorato, she has created large-scale floral environments shaped by celebration, visibility and social value.
Her current practice shifts from production toward inquiry. Rather than working with materials at their peak, she works with what remains after the event, when flowers are no longer seen or valued in the same way. Through processes of preserving, suspending, and rearranging, she repositions discarded botanical materials as carriers of time, memory and attention.
Brenda completed her Masters in Fine Arts at the LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore in 2026. In 2024, she directed the floral vision for Impressions of Monet at Gardens by the Bay, presenting the installation Beneath the Flowerbed. She has also been selected for the Winston Oh Travelogue Award in 2026.
Salvaged dried botanicals, mirror sticker flooring, mirror sticker structural panels, suspended floral remnants, reflective material, mixed media installation (2026)
Arriving After The Event
Arriving After the Event begins after the wedding event, reworking floral material once its brief moment of spectacle has passed.
Grounded in my lived experience of constructing and dismantling luxury wedding environments, the project examines our relationship to flowers that remain physically intact even as their cultural and economic value is withdrawn.
Working specifically with post-wedding florals, the research explores the condition of 'after'—when attention has dispersed, temporary structures have been dismantled, and the material persists beyond its intended function.
It critiques the consumerism and material excess that underpin luxury wedding spectacles while foregrounding an ecological ethic of responsibility through the salvaging and reworking of discarded flowers.
Through reflection and spatial encounter, the project considers what endures when beauty, value and attention begin to fade.
Research methodology and theoretical framework
Methodology
This research adopts a practice-led methodology in which artistic making is the primary mode of inquiry. Knowledge emerges through iterative cycles of experimentation, reflection, documentation, and installation, rather than treating artworks as illustrations of predetermined ideas.
The project traces the 'afterlife' of post-event flowers by following their transformation beyond their ceremonial function.
The research unfolds through several interconnected methods: collecting and salvaging floral materials from weddings and corporate events; preserving and closely observing their deterioration over time; material experimentation focused on colour change, structural collapse, scent, texture and fragility; Mobile Bouquet Studies that explore movement, suspension, balance, and instability; spatial installation testing through the development of Decay Cave; and reflective documentation using photography, journals, sketches and critical writing.
Rather than seeking fixed outcomes, the methodology deliberately embraces uncertainty, allowing material behaviour and decay to actively shape the direction of the research.
Theoretical framework
This research is guided by theories of impermanence, material agency, object value and posthuman ecological thinking.
Together, these perspectives provide a lens for understanding how flowers continue to exist beyond their economic and symbolic functions, and how their transformation complicates human-centred narratives of use and waste.
Object value
The research also draws on theories of commodity value and use value. Flowers command high symbolic and economic value during ceremonial events yet rapidly lose cultural attention once those events conclude.
By following their transition from celebrated object to discarded material, the project questions how value is socially constructed rather than materially inherent, and probes the thresholds at which objects become 'waste'.
Posthuman and ecological thinking
Posthuman and ecological perspectives shift attention away from human-centred narratives towards entangled relations among people, flowers, time, moisture, gravity, scent and decomposition.
The installation resists total control over decay, allowing natural processes to remain visible as active collaborators. In doing so, it repositions deterioration as a co-author of the work, expanding authorship beyond the human artist and foregrounding more-than-human agencies within the installation.
Deanna Ng
Ashley Hi
Sharon Hardjono
Chen Shitong
Wong Shih Yaw
Yin Chua
