Artist Statement for Line Drawings
New York City is always rushing. On the surface of the concrete jungle are vehicles and pedestrians dashing to all the directions and destinations. But it is not the whole dynamic of this city. Looking at the sky of the city patiently, we will find the airspace is as bustling as the ground. “The ordinary practitioners of the city life down below, below the thresholds at which visibility begins”, writes Michel de Certeau. Because of the city’s skyscrapers, the space on top of us is always out of our visibility.
To escape the grasp of the city, and to expand the upper limit of the city’s visibility, I spent a night observing the busy airspace of the city. Looking at the sky from my room’s window, I recorded the trajectory of every airplanes I saw. The resulting images annotates the motion and dynamic of the city’s sky of different times within a day. Through this work, I aim to escape the ordinary imagery totalization and provide a new perspective to this ever-moving city.
NY Art Book Fair Review
My favorite piece that I saw in New York Art Book Fair is Until Death Do Us Part, a very interesting zine by a Chinese publisher called Jiazazhi. The book is put inside of a Hongshuangxi cigarette box, . The book is of the size of the box, and has the cover image of cigarettes. The content of this book, is discarded negatives or prints that collected by Thomas Sauvin, a French artist currently works in Beijing. Images that he collected range from 1985 to 2005, from the time when usage of film camera was popularizing in China to the beginning of digital era. The images in this book record scenes of wedding in China, and they are really appealing for me, who is familiar with the wedding customs and traditions of this country. By collecting thees discarded images, Sauvin is actually collecting memories about wedding and life of Chinese people.
Another amazing work by Jiazazhi is called 3DPRK. It is actually an 3D eyeglass with a slot to place small size images. The artist, Matjaž Tančič, photographed portraitures in North Korea for people of different jobs at different places. These photographs then were printed on small pieces of cardboard, which fit the size of the slot of the 3D glasses. When looking at them through the lens, the images became three-dimensional. The 3D effect highlights each individual in the photograph and creates a kind of theatric scene. And it is kind of ironic as North Koreans can hardly have their own unique voices and characters.
Another book I really like is Kuroyami, by Japanese photographer Sakiko Nomura. The book has a comparatively big size: about 15’ by 10’. Nomura’s photographs are all black&white, and black is the predominant portion of his images. Therefore, each image in this book is printed with a uniform format: print the whole page paper with and leave the bottom part, about 1 inch, white. This method brings fascinating visual experience to the viewers. When I opened the book, I was shocked by the huge size of the black&white grainy image with high contrast. The layout, size, and color of the printing really contribute to visual effect of this book.
Universe and Internet
Navigating within the internet is just like finding an item in a library with endless books or traveling in the universe. Internet is an infinite pool of knowledge and resources with a logical order, just as libraries are using hexagonal stacks to catogrorize the books. It is composed by numerous hexagon libraries with different shelves and books on the shelves. Most of the books are still inaccessible, but there’s always an internal rule and physical law that makes the universe infinite and endless. And internet, although seems to be as infinte as the universe, it in fact has its own order just like the libraries. Everything is managed by standardized languages and protocols. The universe, which is an infinite physical space, also has its orders that well arranged.
Newspaper
In this project I tried to explore people's tendency of consuming newspapers, specifically images and texts. I started browsing the newspapers by myself first, and then used mark pen to block the messages that I did not see at the first glance.The result is that most things that was kept on the newspapers are big titles and attractive images.As we already enetered a digital image era, images are usually the most attracting parts of a newspaper. Using simply titles and images the newspaper could let the audience know the basic information they want to tell us. Just as the curator Benjamin Godsill mentioned in The Last Newspaper Artists in Conversation that medias nowadays are providing their readers what they want us to know, the newspaper can use the combination of titles and images to transmit biased/incomplete messages to their readers effectively.
Color
The most interesting thing for me in the reading is about how people tend to understand a color and there preferences and also how scientists and the film industry developed a mathematical process to describe color and produce films that reflect on people’s tendency. When film company like Kodak giving people tests on their preferences on color, it is interesting to find that people tend to prefer colors that are bright and clean. Another intriguing phenomenon is that people have color memories: when seeing something that they are really familiar with, like Levis Jeans or their own skins, they can remember the color extremely accurately. Therefore, film companies need to make color films that are real but meanwhile try to flatter the color subtly. And this leads to a broader discussion of color photography: whether it is appropriate as an art form. Some people think that colors are too real that makes photographers and photographs lose their creativities and poetic sentiment; others might think that color photography is to fake because the images produced are always trying to flatter the subjects. The kind of debate culminated when William Eggleston’s work was being showed at MoMA, the second color photography exhibition in the art history (the first one is curated by Edward Steichen at MoMA in 1950, but it’s not very influential and underestimated).
For this color theme I made via Adobe Color, I used a photo I took in Coney Island, when sun was about to rise. The complicated image color is simplified by this website to five main colors, two blues from sky and the sea, and three oranges/yellows from the sunshine and cloud. These colors that extract from this image represents peace, because the photo was taken before sunrise, and there was almost no people on the beach at that time. For me, looking at this photograph and these colors always make me feel peace and quietness.
I took another one in front of a BBQ bar during night. The bright and vividblue and pink neon lights of the bar attracted me. The neon lights made the interior of restarurant also colorful and vibrant. Through Adobe Color I extracted theme colors for this photo. From blue to pink, these colors reminds me of vividness and liveliness.
