I stayed in Thailand and Indonesia for a year and a half. The new flora in the tropics brought me a new perspective and interest. The project that started with this interest is the series ‘How to store your stuff in nature’. This series is an experiment to maximize the visual amusement I experienced through tropical plants and to combine nature photography and still-life photography in my way.

“We are all familiar with the wonderful plants that can be found in the tropics. Colourful and magnificent plants attract so many photographers to depict their beauty. You only need to glance at images on social media to see countless examples of this genre. Pionara, a photographer from South Korea, has taken this basic idea and made it Pionara’s own. By locating beautiful plants and adding in select objects, Pionara has performed a very convincing trick. Sometimes we can hardly tell that any object has been added, such as the flower buds, now adorned with cotton buds. With many of the images, you need to look carefully to see if Pionara has added any rogue element, but with others, a hilarious combination can make us smile. We see plants where money is growing, or umbrellas, women’s shoes, and the list goes on. What is so engaging is to try and work out the connections and how Pionara has mischievously placed domestic objects in place. I am also reminded of the surrealist movement, as the initial glance matches our expectations of how plants imagery should look. We then digest the images and take delight in spotting the everyday objects being integrated into the photographs. One thing I know is whenever I view photographs of beautiful plants again, I will be checking to see if there are items hidden in the images. I must thank Pionara for this as I can never quite get Pionara’s images out of my head.” – Martin Parr