UNSCENTED

42x60cm Watercolour - Mixed media paintings, Multi-Sensory Experience
Graduation Project · 2025

Concept, Art Direction, Painting, Fragrance & Object

shay tran

UNSCENTED explores the presence of experiences that resist a fixed form.

Rooted in the cyclical logic of the Five Elements representing five organs, the project reimagines their relationships as five psychological states: Light, Darkness, Negotiation, Periphery and Filtration. Each state generates the conditions for the next, while an opposing cycle creates tension, limits and resistance. Together, they behave as a living emotional system shaped by memory, perception and change.

An Inner anatomy

Generating Cycle

Light → Darkness → Negotiation → Periphery → Filtration → Light

Light → : darkness light creates shadow.
Darkness → Negotiation: uncertainty creates the need for negotiation.
Negotiation → Periphery: negotiation opens up a space between opposing states.
Periphery→ Filtration: the boundary demands a process of selection.
Filtration → Light: through selection, a new light emerges.

Controlling Cycle

Light ↘ Negotiation ↘ Filtration ↘ Darkness ↘ Periphery ↘ Light

Light ↘ Negotiation: excessive light can break the space for negotiation.
Negotiation ↘ Filtration: extreme negotiation can overwhelm the filter.
Filtration ↘ Darkness: excessive filtering can prevent Darkness from fully forming.
Darkness ↘ Periphery: excessive darkness can close off the boundary.
Periphery ↘ Light: the boundary can constrict the emergence of new light.

Wood · Liver · Light

Warmth That Lingered Unnoticed

Inspired by childhood, this world imagines memory as a root system. Experiences of warmth and familiarity settle quietly into the self, becoming an instinctive place of return whenever comfort or strength is needed.

Like a tree sustained by what lies beneath the surface, we continue to draw from what once nourished us. These memories remain active within the present, feeding the person growing above them.

The vessel holds childhood as a source of quiet continuation: deeply rooted, continually nourishing, and capable of drawing us back towards something familiar when we need it most.

Water · Kidneys · darkness

Rooms That Remembered Before You Did

Water imagines memory as a library that can always be entered again.

The library stands empty but its door remains open. At times, the mind returns and searches through what it has stored, disturbing old memories in pursuit of something it needs. When others, it stays for longer, allowing reflection to unfold within everything that has accumulated there.

The open doorway keeps the room in circulation. New experiences continue to enter as older ones resurface, recede and gather momentum again. Memory can move quietly beneath everyday life, then suddenly rise and occupy consciousness with unexpected force.

The door also offers a way forward. However long we remain inside the archive of our own experience, life still continues beyond it, carrying us back into its current.

Like water, the library gives memory a rhythm: always moving, always capable of returning.

Earth · Spleen · periphery

The Mist That Held the Woods

Everyone carries a forest of their own.

Earth imagines this forest as the ground of character: an interior world where beliefs, instincts and ways of seeing are given space to take root. It offers a place for reflection and protection, sustaining what feels essential while remaining connected to the world beyond the self.

Two realities inhabit the same forest. The deer recognise one another across their divide, they come from a different world while sharing the same ground. Their encounter gives difference a place within the landscape, allowing distinct beliefs and inner realities to preserve their character alongside one another.

Earth provides the foundation through which this private ecology can grow. The self develops through what it chooses to nourish, then allows it to settle, and the ground continues to build beneath itself.

Metal · Lungs · negotiation

A Handshake at the Edge of the Battlefield

Two opposing forces have fought hard enough to damage the world they share, echoing the way internal conflict can fracture something within the self. Each side has its own truth, yet both still ultimately belong to the same person.

At the centre of the battlefield, their handshake marks the moment when coexistence is possible. Reconciliation becomes a continuous negotiation, allowing opposing forces to recognise one another and share the same internal space.

Metal gives this relationship its character. It carries strength while remaining responsive to pressure, capable of yielding, adjusting and taking another shape. Lungs echo the same rhythm through release and renewal, creating space for tension to loosen its hold.

Fire · Heart · Filtration

Versions That Stood Outside the Light

An audience has occupied these seats before. These versions have been seen, judged and tested under public light, each representing a possibility that once came close to becoming part of a visible life.

Fire becomes a process of refinement. When metal transformed under heat, everything separated during that process still belongs to the material that shaped the final form. The selves that remained outside the light continue to carry meaning because each contributed to the person who eventually emerged.

The abandoned theatre is their permanent house of honour. Their moments beneath the lights has already passed, now they belongs somewhere more intimate.

Held within the heart, all version still exist quietly, carrying the lives that might have been lived.

The stage belongs to the selves that were once considered possible.

The complete body

Five inner worlds held within the same emotional body.

a sensory language

Jars of scent and solid perfume

Translating image into scent

I developed and formulated an individual fragrance for each vessel, using scent to carry the atmosphere of its painted world into another sensory form.

Form is not a requirement for presence.

Later developed into a packaged object — see Scent as an object ↗