DD1004: Introduction to the Histories of Art II
Final Research and Practice Project

Title of the Work: Pop Art Haniwa

Team Member: Cheng Shao Meng (Merlin), Ong Ting Hui, Amy, Seth Devanshi

Soooo it’s already the end of the semester – it’s been a long and arduous journey but I sure learned a lot! For this project, I got to team up with my amazing team mates Devanshi and Merlin to create a visual response to an artwork or art form in China/ Japan/ India. Initially, it was hard for us to find a topic to work on – all of us did research but we didn’t find anything that resonated with us.

Then, Merlin brought up the case study of the Haniwa – being a gamer, he had quite a wide knowledge base on Japanese games and he found out that Haniwa was appropriated pretty heavily in Japanese video games. I remembered the Haniwa from lecture – I loved the cute form of it, and it was interesting to learn that it was actually adapted into cartoon characters in video games. As all of us really liked this topic, we decided on our topic pretty quickly.

Our initial idea was to adapt pop icons – we eventually picked Marilyn Monroe, but after feedback from Sujatha, we decided to revise our concept and contextualise it further to be more specific. So we picked Hello Kitty, which had better mass appeal and fits better into our concept.

Throughout the whole process of fleshing out the idea and executing it, Merlin and Devanshi were very helpful and we split the work evenly between us to do. All of us put in our own ideas and it was really fun and interesting to discuss this project with them!

All in all it was a really lighthearted and fun project and a great way to end the semester – it was hands on and great to do and we all learned many things in the process!