Tripti Gore Chandorkar
花神 “Flower goddess”
Tripti Gore Chandorkar is a strategic partner and producer at Xiang Li Art, and a great deal of what you read on this site is hers — the exhibition reports, the empress histories, the pieces on cloisonné and scholars’ rocks. She is the creator and writer behind triptiji, her own site about art, creative projects, and the family and friends she makes them with.
She came to the work through a friendship. Fei Wu introduced Tripti to her mother’s paintings nearly twenty years ago, and since then Tripti has written for the blog, worked on designs, and turned up for the festivals, library shows and gallery openings that the rest of this site describes — most of them in her words.
Xiang painted her smiling out over an armful of peonies and roses, a white scarf streaming across the silk behind her and two white doves crossing the sky, one of them carrying an olive branch. She titled it 花神, flower goddess — high praise from Xiang, and not only for beauty. A flower goddess is a woman of wisdom and of grace, and the title is how Xiang says, in two characters, how much she loves and respects her.
In September 2024 the portrait was framed in gold and hung at the Cambridge Public Library’s Central Square branch, beside two of Xiang’s canvases, for her Art and AI evening at the Cambridge Science Festival. The label next to it was Tripti’s own: eight months of working with Fei and Adam Leffert on Xiang’s projects, and how much those daily conversations had fed her own creative work.
Tripti has spent years putting Xiang’s paintings into words. This is the one that answers back.
Go and find them
This page is about the painting. Their own work is better.
What is in this painting
Read off the silk itself and not yet confirmed with the artist — the motifs are there, the meanings are our reading of them.
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1 The dove with the olive branch
Top left, wings fully open, the branch held in its beak — the plainest sign for peace there is.
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2 The second dove
Flying in from the right, without a branch. The two of them frame her head.
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3 The earrings
Long gold drops set with blue stones, painted as carefully as the face.
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4 The peony
The largest flower on the silk and the one held closest to her. In Chinese painting the peony is 花中之王, the king of flowers — honor, and a life in full bloom.
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5 The white scarf
It begins at her shoulders and does not stop: it streams out across the whole left side of the silk in long washes of white and green, like wind, or water.
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6 The hand
Holding all the stems at once, fingers loose. The whole bouquet balances on it.
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7 The bouquet
Below the peony, a garden’s worth of everything else — roses, lilies, and a water lily on its pad at the bottom edge.
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8 The title
Down the left edge in seal script: flower goddess. Xiang means it as the highest praise — beauty, but also wisdom and grace.
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9 The signature and seal
Li Xiang, Forbidden City, Beijing, with her red seal beneath.
At the Cambridge Science Festival
Framed and hung for Xiang Li’s Art and AI evening at the Cambridge Science Festival, 24 September 2024.
