25 Sep

'Collection' is our main project for this week. I learnt something from the lecture which is : a collection is not only about showing a track of time and events. I think your idea and what the audience can see and learn from your collection is the main point.

Sometimes I thought an exhibition about collection should have a certain scale for the audience who have no clue about the artists initial ideas to understand the connection and maybe the developing evidence. But some collection we were shown this morning clearly indicated that the quantity of the pieces in your work had nothing to do with the collection's value and meaning.

What I did today actually started without a initial plan or even just a draft. It all began at the moment when I found a spider weaving a web near me at lunchtime. After taking a picture of it, I started collecting photos of hands, most of which belong to human.

Hands are essential tools in daily life for both humans and spiders, where great memories can be found. How do you see your hands? Why do you need your hands? How do your hands build up your life step by step? How do the pieces of daily life reflect or make up the true and adorable ‘you’? The theme just became clearer and clearer when recording images and personal details about the hands.

How about putting this in the history? How about connect then to other great works?

 

I also did other collection about the circle things and about the serried things.

I am always interested in how things are put together. It's like picking one single thing and keep copying it lots of times. When you see them in large quantity, the individual thing just got ignored and the only thing you will remember is the whole scene like a pattern.

26 Sep

I was thinking continuing my ' Hand ' collection which includes a series pictures of different hands from different people and even not people and little dairy about the memories and story behind the person especially about the memories with his or her hands.

I thought it would be quite interesting because hands are such useful but we kinda forgot what an important role they play in our life. And the most used sense about hands is touching but it's hard to record via touching. So I came up with the idea to use different methods to record those special memories. 

It was going pretty well since I really got quite interesting story like the special accessories on their hands which are always from someone important in their life.

But I soon learnt something from the lecture today. My favorite one is the installation from Ai Weiwei. It's made with the metal materials collected from an huge earthquake in Sichuan, China. I was impressed by it for there is so much meaning in it. Ai Weiwei also wrote the names of the lost in earthquake on the wall. The point is, besides the earthquake itself, the reason it caused so many death is the poor quality of the construction due to the corruption in local governments. So the metal materials are probably those poor qualified ones which made the tragedy.

I started to think of my own project. I know you can't force yourself to put meaning into your work and sometimes you don't really need some. But since I always like digging into the art work and find out the story and meaning hidden behind, so I really want to say more things in my work. 

Also, the making process in Ai Weiwei's work also impressed me since he actually used human hands to straighten those metal. The audience may not know but as the artist himself or herself, or someone aware of the tough work behind, I think it just feels wonderful to see my work being made and being displayed.

28 Sep

I always have the habit of taking photographs from my surroundings, so I started my new collection focusing on ' surface '.

It is mainly about the surfaces of the fabric (sheet, mat, shirt), skin ( me) and other photographs exploring the sense of touching.

First I wanted to make a little collection and exhibition about putting two pictures ( one is about a small place, the other one is about a huge area which doesn't look like but is related or opposite to the first one). For example, I would put a picture of the textile of a backpack with one of the moon. The surfaces on the backpack and the moon are similar, but the backpack and the moon are totally different things. I soon found the connection between : the backpack is for daily use and the moon is a dream for the whole human beings. So basically they are all missions to complete but with different levels.

I also had an idea about describing a world of a blind person. For that the blind use their highly developed sense of touching instead of the eyes to feel the world. So I thought the surface pictures can just visualize the feelings of feeling the world by your fingers.

My final exhibition includes pictures about exaggerating parts in sheet, mat and shirt, picture of my waist and chest, pictures taken behind a glass door while I put my hands on the glass door but on the other side, pictures of overexposing darkness showing beautiful but mysterious images.

I printed them out onto black A2 cards and connected them by black plastic bags. Those black plastic bags can reflect the lights and showing amazing texture under the lights but still black. I chose to hang it on the wall to give a whole view to the audience.

 

On the display day, I got really good feedback that my work was telling the ideas I had in the first place. One girl actually guessed out that I was showing a world of a blind guy when I was not allowed to talk while others talked about my thing.