Exhibition YUMMY ROSE: Expired Edition by Naraphat Sakarthornsap

Exhibition Opening: May 4, 2025, from 5:00 PM onwards

🗓 May 4 – May 10, 2025

📍 HOP PHOTO GALLERY, HOP Hub of Photography 2nd Floor, MAD, Man Man Srinakarin

In May 2024, the YUMMY ROSE exhibition by Naraphat Sakarthornsap showcased rose jam within an art space, presenting it as a consumer product—ready to be bought, sold, and distributed—no different from ordinary commodities found in retail shops. The floral imagery within the exhibition served as a metaphor for complex economic systems, market monopolies, and the transformation of beautiful plant life into consumable goods with expiration dates.

As time passed, the rose jam inevitably expired. But what has not expired is the meaning the work once carried.

On May 4, 2025, YUMMY ROSE returns, featuring the original pieces now altered by time—both physically and temporally. Especially notable is the rose jam, once a consumable product, now re-presented as an expired item being sold at a lower price. Meanwhile, the 100 rose images from the original exhibition have increased in symbolic value over time.

Although the expiration date of the rose jam is clearly printed on its label, the lives of the flower growers and jam producers lack such defined limits. They continue to live, struggle, and work within an economic system where tomorrow remains uncertain. The precariousness of agricultural labor is masked beneath the fragrance and sweetness of the product, while their identities are often absent from any label.

This exhibition serves as a reflective space that challenges the notion that value dies with the expiration date. Instead, it opens up possibilities for re-interpretation. In this context, the jars of jam no longer signify “edible goods,” but become vessels of semiotic exchange. Similarly, the rose photographs—though no longer in production—gain value through scarcity, akin to assets whose prices continue to rise with no sign of decline.

It is, therefore, unsurprising to see expired jam placed alongside images that have appreciated in value.

This exhibition may serve as a lens through which to view the fragility and complexity of consumption within a social context.