Author: Chanel Chan

Loves blue and white
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Painting Progress

FINAL WORK WIP #1

This is a picture that I took when I was in Taiwan. I chose this picture mainly for its tight composition. However, the lighting in this picture is quite even out, so I think I might have some problems trying to emote the mood through lighting when I am painting.

Draft Sketches

Colour Tests 

I believe that I had better control with tonal difference in my second colour test but I think there is still a lack in my lighting control. I also feel like I need to have better control with my neutral colours.


This was a draft I did after considering the comments given. I think my colours are more cohesive now and the picture is really coming together. But I think I have to increase the chroma of 1 or 2 buildings to raise the contrast of the picture as a whole.

FINAL WORK #1Sights of Taiwan | 48 cm x 17 cm

FINAL WORK WIP #2

Draft Sketches

Colour Tests


Final Work #2
The Fishsoup Coffeeshop | 23 cm x 26 cm

PAST WORKS




Copy of Ivan Shishkin’s Work



 

 

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Assignment 2

Please click the link below to access my narrative: chanel5chan.wixsite.com/mysite-1/

My approach to this assignment differed largely from the rest of the class which aimed to create a multi-layered narrative. Instead, I played with the assumption that time is frozen in this narrative to bring forth another perspective when looking at our own and other people’s lives.

Hence, through my use of image and text, I hope that viewers will first feel a sense of affinity with the sense of loneliness and detachment that most of my subjects exude. However, more than just that, I wish to offer my viewers a beautiful tension as these broken pieces are stitched together.

You will also realise that my drawings have 3 key composition:

Rounded composition:

All of my rounded compositions depict the same female character that is more cartoon-like in nature. Such an arrangement represented how we look at our own lives. It shows how we tend to magnify our struggles and feel as though though the world revolved our own lives.

Square composition:

However, I injected more of such squared compositions that reflect  snippets of everyday happenings that we missed out. The subjects in these compositions often look lonely, contemplative or left out. A level of tension lies within these subjects, reflective of.

Long composition:

Lastly, I ended my narrative with 2 of such long compositions that aims to highlight another perspective. This brings the viewer one step further, granting them more vision to a particular scene. It gives them the agency to view single subjects together, providing these fragments a sense of togetherness.

 

As photographer Nguan wishes to “preoffer the possibility of beauty as a balm for everyday sorrow.”

I wish to let viewers know that maybe their struggles aren’t that formidable , because everybody has their own battles to fight and therein lies a sense of hope.

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Visual Storytelling – Assignment 1

Finding a character that I felt strongly for and one with depth took me a while before I realised how apt Mulan would have been for this project. I really really love Mulan, especially the Chinese adaptation of it.

Mulan, 2009

Since I was referencing from the Chinese film, the ideas of filial piety, sacrifice, honour and the torment of war were brought forward more explicitly. I personally also believed that these values far preceded the issue of breaking gender stereotypes as portrayed in Disney’s Mulan. With the intent of portraying Mulan as one who embodied all these values, I have reached the final composition as attached below.

A kneeling female figure sits inside an armored exterior. The overwhelming size of the armour represents the main role that Mulan played in the movie. However, the fearless and glorified warrior was merely a facade that Mulan had to put on. It nothing like how her men viewed her. She was helpless, lost and broken through the many years of warship, which explains the female figure entrapped in armour’s body. Kneeling down, hands clenched together, she was nothing but just an extremely vulnerable female warrior.

Another key symbol that I played with was the magnolia flower which is what Mulan literally meant (木兰花).  One of magnolia flowers’ key representation was that of nobility. Hence, a blooming magnolia flower sits on the yellow mask, indicating how Mulan’s nobility was what people saw superficially but never her true identity. Her true self was the complete opposite of a blooming flower. It was in fact a withering magnolia flower and is shown through the extended branches surrounding the kneeling figure.

I chose to paint the composition in acrylic paint because it was a medium that could bring about strength and power to the armoured figure. The use of red over the actual rendering of the armour further enhanced the toughness of Mulan as a warrior. A strong back lighting was also seemingly cast at the back to elude a sense of glorification. (p.s. Am super super glad that my touch for acrylic painting hasn’t completely disappear after more than a year so YAY)

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3D: Project 2 Final

My chosen object that was of importance to me is actually my yearly planner. A planner is very important to me because I hate not being organised, and not being able to keep track of what I’m expected to finish. Hence, the planner is actually my way of exerting control over time to ensure that I have what it takes to keep doing the things I love. This includes meeting the people I love and doing things I love and of course, to stay on task for school. The planner is like a little break down of small baby steps that I need to take for the life ahead of me.

So I wanted to create something that represented a protection of time and of my dreams. The first thing that came to my mind was actually a dream catcher and I did try to incorporate the dream catcher together with my work. However, the complementary addition to a dream catcher didn’t really come through which resulted in a new search of other items that were used to protect something.

I thought of the wind chime, where it’s use to ward off evil spirits. In a way, the planner is used as a way to prevent mess and chaos in my life which made a wind chime a possible representation.

Next up, was trying to include my desire to exert control over time. I thought of what kind of items required an action to protect something and I thought of an umbrella. An umbrella is used to shelter one from rainy days and a physical action is required to open an umbrella. Hence I thought of making an umbrella wind chime.

I made an origami umbrella which can be opened and closed. They were of varying sizes, with the biggest closest to the viewer. This is purposeful in showing how the current month I am in will always be a period of time that I exerted greatest amount of control. The smaller umbrellas then represented previous months that have passed, which also represented time that I have either exerted control over or failed to do so.

There are bells inside each umbrella to further enhance the idea of it being a wind chime (: The size of the wind chime was also portable and easily hand carried because my planner is one that can be brought anywhere and everywhere.

If the umbrellas I made could open and close to a greater degree, I think it would be better at communicating some of my ideas but yes, super happy that I managed to make an origami umbrella that could open and close HAHA.  Oh and I should have thought of the use of my colours as well, instead of it being  a random aesthetically pleasing element of my work.

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3D: Rube Goldberg Machine

So my chosen movie scene was when Mulan makes her decision to go to war on behalf of his father. What I caught from the scene was her immense contemplation and the use of rain/thunder sounds to guide the entire scene. Hence, I thought that my machine will encapsulate these elements that were of significance to me.

Video of successful attempt below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qm9FTDp9XcLW6BP9hG7dD1N0c_Vp-TEE/view?usp=sharing

I realised that I have tendency to not express my thought processes accurately during critique sessions, so I guess this is the only platform left for me to explain the purpose behind some of my machine’s components.

So what I did to portray Mulan’s contemplation was to complicate the ramp downwards. I did not create a straight path for the marble to roll down. Instead I created triangular obstacles as well as  curved paths for the marble to roll.

And from the scene, it seems that every huge downpour or thunder heard signified the next course of action for Mulan. So I wanted to create that with the first see-saw which also act as a rain stick. However the force exerted on the rain stick was too quick, such that the raining sound was not captured fully.

The first see-saw (which also represents the downpour) triggers the next movement where the ball rolls down a straight and steeper path. The steeper ramp signifies how Mulan becomes more resolved and motivated to fight for his father. And I also made the marble hit some bells which represented the sounds of the thunder. This was an attempt to sort of fuse the effects of sound and Mulan’s behaviour together into one.

Like what Peter critiqued, it is true that my machine was lacking a key component of a dramatic move at the end. To be honest, I wanted to include the last act of the marble triggering a cutting act but couldn’t do it in the end. This is so because I went back to amend the 2nd tier of ramps to increase it’s level of complexity (where the sounds are heard). So I kinda lost stamina to create the last action which was indeed very crucial. So boo to me ):

As much as I get super uncomfortable with 3D briefs, I actually quite enjoyed the amount of problem solving this machine required of me. And it was quite a joy to have the opportunities to constantly resolve errors. But I guess I needed to put more thought into grounding my piece of work to the concept which was probably my biggest takeaway from the critique session.

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Interesting Finds: Sound Art

I have never taken much interests in installation work when I visit museums prveiously, however, there was one sound art piece that left an impression on me.

“Raising Stars and Restoring Souls” – Zul Mahmood

This piece of work was part of the Majulah Singapura Series in SAM. I guess i was intrigued by the scale of the interaction and how the sound produced felt like it was following the participant. What seemed like random sounds going through metal pipes turned out to be a deconstruction of our national anthem.  I thought that added layer to the sound installation was what truly left an impression on me.

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4D: Evocative Objects

Brainstorming

Our group started this project through brainstorming  possible locations in school where we could create a narrative/ message from. Not too sure how we eventually settled with the toilet, but we felt that the toilet is a public space that people often reveal their personal struggles. The privacy and intimacy that a toilet provides for different people was what we decided to explore as we went along.

Initial Idea

So this was our first draft in terms of set up. It was  a point in the development that we were still  rather focused on bringing out the idea of bringing a private space to the public space. That explained why we wanted to set up an open wooden frame to give the idea that the participant was stepping into a different space. However, Michael pointed out the redundancy of the framing as well as the importance or priority that our narratives had in this installation. Hence, we needed to think deeper into what exactly do we want to convey and how were we going to achieve that.

Further Development

With that, we decided to find a focus in the narratives we were sharing first. We decided to share a wide variety of stories on mental health issues due to the gravity of the issue and for the (almost) unlimited potential it had within a confined topic.

We decided to do a little more research to keep our set up more grounded to ideas that resonated with mental health issues and hence explains the reasons for our installation below.

Final Outcome (titled UNFOLDING NARRATIVES)

We found out that actually 1 in 10 Singaporeans suffer from mental health problems. Hence, we decided to place 9 toilet bowls to symbolize the 9 pair of listening ears that are available to a single person suffering from mental health.

Since we aimed at encouraging open conversations about mental health, we decided that each toilet bowl will be playing a different mental health problem. This will allow participants to gain more awareness about the variety of problems that mental health entailed. The listening of the recording will be done with headphones attached to the side of the toilet bowl.

Lastly, we wanted to include an element of community involvement where participants could share their personal encounters of struggling with mental fitness or even their interactions with such people. We thought that we needed to create a safer space for people to share their opinions on a rather sensitive topic. Hence we decided that we will provide materials for different forms of expressions, writing, speaking and even drawing.