JUN LUO 
ILLUSTRATOR ϟ ARTIST
 

In July 2023, I had the pleasure to work with WesGroup Properties to create an 8 ft x 20 ft outdoor mural commissioned for the Vancouver Mural Festival in the River District neighbourhood. For two weeks, my team of friends and fellow artists collaborated together to bring our first mural to life. On the southernmost waterfront of Vancouver, our mural was sandwiched between a riverbank and walking trail. Our goal for Birdsong was to reimagine budding communities as gardens. Communities, like gardens, flourish when it is tended with care; watered, weeded, and nurtured. Like flowers, people put down their roots to grow and cultivate their communities, which becomes the cornerstone for sustaining generations to come. There is a cycle of renewal and birth ingrained in the flowers we all love so much, and its fleeting lifespan provides a scope of lessons: we weather the storms and sunlight, bask in the beauty around us, make our return to the earth, and the cycle repeats. The conception of our mural was inspired by the native flora of the Fraser River that flowers in the summer and we wanted to create a vibrant tapestry of florals and foliage at its peak bloom. The piece titled, “Birdsong”, depicts a myriad of Joe Pye weeds, penstemons intertwining with budding Rose of Sharons and one fully grown rose towering above its neighbours while flanked by mirrored gardenias on the sides. For the colours, we turned to Art Nouveau for inspiration and opted for soft shades of pink, orange, yellow, lilac, olive and seafoam green. The rendering of the flowers is overlarge but stylised, while maintaining a simplification seen in the little to no shadow in the flora, and instead placing emphasis on neat contour lines on the petals, stems and leaves to create dimensionality. The overlap of curving and asymmetrical shapes in the stems and tendrils lends an aspect of realism in the growth patterns of flowers as seen in nature, but throughout the mural, there is a return to the exaggerated and stylized elements.