The Tulip Paradox captures the contradiction at the heart of tulipmania, where the delicate tulip, a symbol of fleeting elegance, became a vehicle for financial frenzy. Tulips bloom briefly, a transient beauty, yet during the 17th century, they fueled an irrational speculative bubble, with prices soaring to absurd heights before inevitably collapsing. The paradox lies in how something so ephemeral became entangled in human constructs of value and greed.
Visually, I see this concept as a collision of organic and artificial elements: the vibrant 3d printed blooms of tulips juxtaposed with stock market lists, a matrix of financial symbols, and surreal datascapes. It reflects the layered tensions I aim to explore, where the fragility of nature clashes with the raw chaos of human economic systems. The tulip’s natural cycle of growth and decay becomes a metaphor for speculative booms and busts, a pattern we see rhyming endlessly in history, from the Dutch Golden Age to today’s Bitcoin that in a full circle twist has been accused of being a tulip bubble.
In Tulip Paradox, beauty becomes a trap, value becomes illusion, and nature becomes a stage for human folly. It reflects the fragile dance between what is real and what we choose to believe.