NEWSPAPER
“I will flip the page and I will start reading something that I would never, in a million years, click on actively,” Says Nate Lowman about making art out of newspapers in the artist discussion, “The Last Newspaper”.“It is something in between this active notion of clicking on something and then reading it, as opposed to the almost passive kind of flipping through the pages.” This is exactly how I started my Newspaper project. When I received the assignment, I had no idea what I was going to work on for this project. Newspaper, in my generation, is not as popular as years ago. People at my age, including myself, do not read the newspaper on a daily basis. However, I knew that I wanted to do something that relates to my own culture for this project. So I went to Chinatown and purchased a copy of Sing Tao Daily (星島日報), a Chinese newspaper that has an audience body of mainly Cantonese who live in Chinatown. As I flipped through the pages, the advertisement sections caught my eye. This section relates deeply to our lives. So, I started to explore deeper into the philosophical meaning behind it. I found that some content in this section belongs to the topics of life and death. The prostitutes ads remind me of the topic of sex, which is the beginning of everyone’s life; the marriage ads is around the topic of spouse; the ads for treating infirtinity is about birth; and the public announcement of people’s death marks the end of life. Through cutting and pasting these ads to my newspaper project, I create a full cycle of life and death.