About Bucket Works
Flowers have opened doors.
I’m a queer Korean-American farmer-florist and educator based in Southeast Michigan, with a background in digital media and project management. I’m drawn to unusual flowers, strong forms, unexpected color, and the tension between something lush and something more spare or strange.
My work can be loose and garden-led or more architectural, and I’m especially interested in botanical spatial design: using flowers and plant material to change how a space is seen and experienced.
Flowers started as something to grow and arrange. Over time, they’ve also become part of how I learn, teach, connect with people, and advocate for the things I care about.
Grown close to home with love.
A lot of the flowers I use begin on a small converted side lot I tend to in Hazel Park. The rest come largely from other growers around Southeast Michigan. Growing the materials themselves has changed the way I design with them. You learn how flowers move, which ones are fickle, and what blooms look completely different when cut at the right moment.
The garden gave me my first design language: asymmetry, movement, odd proportions, and things growing through and around one another. I’m also drawn to Eastern ideas around space and landscape, the material philosophies of Mono-ha and Post-minimalism, the drama of Baroque light and shadow, and set designs that changes how a space is experienced.
Where some of this comes from:
I grew up around people who paid attention to plants long before I understood that as a form of knowledge.
My grandparents grew Korean vegetables wherever they lived. They could recognize things I walked past without seeing, like purslane growing in a sidewalk crack or an oak tree dropping acorns that could eventually become food. My maternal grandmother also came from a family that farmed leeks and green onions.
Korean church life was another constant as my family moved around. It kept me connected to Korean food, language, people, and traditions, and it was also where I was first introduced to floral arranging.
How I source:
I prioritize flowers grown at Bucket Works and by local growers, both because the material is often better and because I want more of the money spent on flowers to stay in the local economy. When I source farther away, I try to know what I’m buying and who I’m buying it from rather than treating the global flower market as apolitical.
Bucket Works supports the boycott of Israeli agricultural products. I don’t purchase Israeli-grown flowers or Danziger varieties. Imports are used selectively when local or U.S.-grown material can’t reasonably do the job. Some of those questions eventually become essays, field notes, or other work in LEARN.
Send support from afar
Help me realize some of my big goals for the year: to breed new varieties of zinnias and dahlias; to open a store for tubers, bulbs, and ceramic wares; to double my growing space by removing three trees; to buy my first pottery wheel.