sakamoto 
Born in Malaysia in 1974, Hee Siiow-Wey escaped a dysfunctional family and abusive father by enrolling at a university in Taiwan. After earning her PhD in molecular medicine, she spent lonely days working as a researcher for a university-affiliated hospital. After her 30th birthday, she discovered S&M. Falling deeper into the S&M scenes in both Taipei and Tokyo, she began photographing her partners. She presented them as shining stars, freed from the shackles of their routine lives. Around 2011, after struggling to find an exhibition venue in Taiwan’s conservative art world, and also beginning to fear for the privacy of her models, she began centering her practice around herself.
Through repeated trial and error, around 2016, she started using flowers and trees as props, while continuing to shoot alone. “The human body is big. So the flowers I shoot with must be big too,” she says. “It’s a challenge to bring them home on a scooter, and it’s difficult adjusting them to fit your body, putting them into your butt or genitals, and fixing them in place. They’re not something you can insert so deeply.”
Every weekend she leaves her cramped flat in Taipei for the flower markets, where she searches for just the right blossoms and plants. Making her purchases, she rushes home (the flowers open too quickly), then twists and turns on her cloth-covered kitchen table in her makeshift studio, in time with the five-second shutter clicks of her digital camera on a tripod.
The pleasure of masochistic bondage lies in the rope, which in denying the body of freedom, liberates the mind and opens the doors to deep feelings of joy that are otherwise locked away. With the body immobilised, the spirit seeks out its inner world, as in Zen or meditation. In this work, the naked artist is shown tied up with flora. The lotus, orchid, bamboo and pine that bind her may be the spirit that would otherwise be set free by a rope, overflowing from her body. The English title of this work is The Vessel That Blossoms, with a play on vessel to mean a boat. Aboard her flowering ship, her spirit continues its one-woman journey, ever deeper into the world.