「Event」Book Launch: Flowers in the Mirror: A Reader

📅 April 26, Sunday 
⏰ Time: 14:30 - 16:30
🎙Guest Speaker: Ruben Lundgren (Author)
    Moderator: Jasper from Cactus Press (local independent publisher)
🌐 Language: English
📍 Location: Nowhere Bookstore Netherlands
Piet Heinstraat 42, 2518 CJ, The Hague
💶 Admission: €5 (fully redeemable for in-store purchases)
（Free for Nowhere Republic Passport Holder）

Event Description

Flowers in the Mirror presents a kaleidoscopic overview of Ruben Lundgren’s work, bringing together new projects, earlier series, found footage, and photographs from his personal archive. Through the layering of images, unexpected connections and associations emerge, inviting viewers to reconsider the relationship between photography and reality.

Drawing on Lundgren’s twenty years of life and observation in China, the publication reflects his enduring fascination with the tension between image and reality. Over time, this interest has developed into a more existential inquiry—one that explores his queer identity, his position as both outsider and insider, and his long-standing interest in surfaces and facades.

The title refers to the Chinese proverb “as the moon in the water and flowers in a mirror,” a metaphor for something that appears vivid yet ultimately remains elusive. In dialogue with Lundgren’s working method, it foregrounds a central question of the book: how do we record and represent a culture that is, in many ways, intangible?

About the Speaker

As a photography student, Ruben Lundgren (NL) travelled to China in 2005, where he settled for the next twenty years. Flowers in the Mirror draws on his life and observations in China. His enduring fascination with photography and the tension between image and reality form the starting point of his work. Over time, this interest has evolved into an existential inquiry, in which Lundgren explores his queer identity, his position as both an outsider and insider in China, and his long-standing fascination with facades.