This is a valuable experience  that we learn art history  through a process of organizing an artifact exhibition.

At the beginning, we have some difficulties in deciding our topics and objects.  Then we finally decided to study the Chinoiserie

topic. We went through many research materials and we realised that Chinoiserie style was closely tied to female. Therefore,we would like to approach this topic by discussing the relationships between Chinoiserie and Female at 18th Century.

During the preparation of the gallery proposal, we went through many argument about what objects we need to put inside the gallery. At first, we are stunned by the great amount of Chinoiserie subject that available for our research, but we need to narrow down our research and decide on only 4 objects. Since we want to talk about “Chinoiserie and Female”, bedroom would be a great place and scenario for us to start. Because at that time, woman are most likely all housewives, the place they could control would be their bedroom or dressing room. Therefore, by studying their chinoiserie styled bedroom, we could better understand their partiality of Chinoiserie style.

This is our final outcome of the gallery proposal. As you can see we used computer model to simulate the actual gallery.

This is the result after we considered many factors. First of all, I think gallery need to show the artefact in the condition that best represents their function and culture, provide short and precise information for the visitors. Secondly, gallery need to protect the artefact. Thirdly, gallery need to engage the audience through visual, auditory,tactile or sensual stimulators. Fourthly, gallery need to provide souvenirs or something that could be take away by the visitors.

Hence, we decide to use computer model to best represent the real gallery, because we could model everything according to our need, especially the lightings. As you can see from above picture, specific lightings are designed to illuminate the artefacts and walltext.  Besides, as we are doing in computer, we could model the surface according to the real gallery material. For example, the floor are set as wooden floors.

Furthermore, this kind of computer interactive model could be the future form of gallery. Since we may not be able to afford to travel to certain country to visit the museums there, it would be great for people to “visit”the gallery online. Now we could only look at pictures that objects are isolated and against white background, it does not give us the right atmosphere to appreciate the objects. Hence, it would be great that people can visit the museum website and have the opportunity to play with interactive games such as our project. The visitor could look around the online gallery which are modelled exactly the same as the actual physical model. Isn’t that cool?

All in all, through this project, I learned to approach art history in a new way. I know how to narrow down and focus on one problem when we try to understand certain culture. This trained me on selecting information and transfer information into shorter but effective message towards the audience.