WHO: Multidisciplinary artist Doan Ly came to the U.S. from Vietnam when she was 8 years old. After graduating from college, she worked in New York as the managing director of a nonprofit and soon found that the only way to pull herself away from the stress that came with her position was to get a weekend job at a flower shop.
Ly’s side venture proved serendipitous as it reignited her love of botanicals and gave her a creative outlet: Seven years later, she launched A.P. Bio, her studio of botanical photography.
WHY: To capture her artistic botanicals, Ly taught herself photography, and those images became their own art form, which can be experienced via an Instagram account blossoming with her poetic—and always visually striking—photography. To wit, Chronicle Chroma recently published Still Life, a collection of her creations.
WHAT: Her feed is filled with images she has photographed and styled, including florals against vibrant backgrounds, portraits of people with flowers, and short videos that are as inventive as they are colorful.
IN HER WORDS: “I have reached a point in my flowers and photography where I want to go deeper and tell a more personal narrative. I’m not sure what form that will take, but I want to see what would happen if I meshed my Vietnamese background with the world I’ve created here, and how those emotions would affect my work.”
