Directions for Project 00:

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4 Project themes to choose:

  • NUTRITION
  • NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
  • THE PORTRAIT
  • AI IN VISUAL STORYTELLING
  • LANGUAGES

I decided to choose THE PORTRAIT as my project theme, mainly because I like capturing families and friends since I was young. Especially as an eldest sister, I always like to use pictures to record the moment of my siblings growing up. Also, as an international student, I often move around, meet different friends from different countries. I like looking at pictures I took for them or myself, which brings me back to the moment we spent together. I found them really precious.

Direction 1: Missing

keywords:

  • Nostalgic
  • Longing
  • Missing
  • Distance
  • Connection
  • Memories

Image research/ Inspiration:

I put ”missing”, ”cut out”, ”art” on Pinterest and found these inspiration pieces above. I chose them because I think they really fit the mood of the keywords. ”Imagination” is the new keywords that came inside my mind. Whenever we miss someone, we always imagine they’re by our side, spending our time together. ”Imagination” links to the word ”dream”, which gives me an idea to draw the location of the portrait that the person always longing to visit, or draw a surreal place that appeared in their dream before, would be interesting to explore. Because I want to create portraits that speaks more about the person. As dreams are all about the self—your feelings and behaviours—if you’re dreaming about a specific person in your life, then it’s likely there’s some aspect of them that is currently at work in your life.

Furthermore, I think the cut out method is really clever to send this message to audiences, to express the strong feeling of missing someone. The idea of using strings on the images also fits the word ”connection”.

The Lobster is a 2015 absurdist black comedy drama film. David is escorted to a hotel after his wife leaves him for another man. The hotel manager reveals that single people have 45 days to find a partner or they will be transformed into an animal of their choice. The film poster is simple with black and white colours. There’s only one character in the poster, doing a hugging pose by herself. In between it’s empty, and if we look closer to her facial expression, she looks serious. I like the way it’s simple and abstract but at the same time it speaks louder than a normal portrait. It’s really clever to create the emptiness as the main object of the picture.
On Pinterest, I also find these art work interesting of how the artist using tearing the portraits and mixing words with it. So that, to let audience understand more of the feelings and background behind the person of the picture, and create a stronger connection between the artwork and the audiences. Maybe I can mix a page of diary, dream journal of the person or their current emotions with the portrait together.

Direction 2: Personification

Image research/ Inspiration:

I realised most of my friends and families have their own nicknames which I found it interesting if I combine those elements with the person together in the picture. Because a person’s nickname can represent themselves a lot as well. For example, my mum calls me Pineapple bread, my sister used to called herself Sweet dumpling because she loves eating it. One of my friend nickname Muji and he loves to go to a Taiwan food stall in Soho to get nice fried chicken breasts. I named him another nickname ”Mujipai” because in Mandarin ”jipai” means chicken breast.

Direction 3: Yin & Yang

On one of the Exploring Studio Practices sessions, teacher told us to brainstorm the objects for a direction. Just let all stuff in our mind let it out.

I bring a group photo was taken in Okinawa, Japan with my friends this summer with a homemade seashells photo frame I bought there as well to study.

During the process, I was thinking about the sea lives, mythic creatures like mermaids and sirens. What kind of feelings the ocean brings me? When it comes to shoal, beach, sunny, it’s refreshing, relaxing. But when it comes to deep sea, bad weather, it’s mysterious, adventurous, horrifying… I realise when it comes to the surface, how people mostly present themselves it’s the good side of them. But when we dig deeper of ourselves, you would find some secrets, traumas that we’d like to hide. These ideas give me a direction of yin & yang which there’re always 2 sides of everything. I’m thinking to combine this idea to create a portrait to show more than just one side of the person to show more depth to the audiences.

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