found images – K I M .

Forrest Gump: Final

In this project, you are tasked to pick four movie quotes either from one movie or various movies that you have watched over the years. Your challenge is to create a visual narrative that expresses each quote using only symbols, pictograms, dingbats (ornaments), icons and engravings as your visual vocabulary.

I was pretty excited to start on this project, mostly because of how organic the brief is and its potential for personal input and interpretation. I started by compiling a list of quotes from movies that I enjoyed that could potentially be used for the project –

Originally, I wanted to have quotes from several genres of movies, but I found that the nature of the quotes would result in vastly different aesthetics across the 4 pieces. Therefore, I restricted myself to movies from the same director – my future husband Christopher Nolan. I am a huge fan of Nolan’s works, especially with how well he manipulates the element of time in each of his movies. And I love that every time the credits start rolling at the end of his films, I am left heart-pounding, skin tingling, wanting more. BUT enough of that. This isn’t a movie review.

We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. – Memento, 2000

In the movie, the protagonist Leonard Shelby suffers from anterograde amnesia, a disorder that prevents him from making new memories from the point that he contracts the disorder. Shelby then depends on written notes, polaroids and sometimes tattoos on his body to help him remember and generate a narrative of his own life, to give himself meaning.

The movie made me think about the idea of self-perception. Oftentimes, the way we think of ourselves may not tally with our actual state of being. Our perception is always distorted, depending on our emotional state at that point in time.

I began with exploring literal ideas of reflection and of course, the image of a person looking into a mirror came to mind.

However, this idea was immediately abandoned because I realized that a literal interpretation might not give the quote the depth that it needed. I then thought about other things with reflective qualities and came to the idea of puddles of water.

Instead of using human beings as the main subject matter of the piece, I wanted to use a rhinoceros and juxtapose it the element of wings. Rhinos are weighty, heavy creatures and one would never imagine them otherwise. Juxtaposing it with dragonfly’s wings and playing with the proportion introduces a new meaning to the rhino – airy fairy, head in the clouds, the rhino thinks dreams of dreams that could never be true. In the puddle, the rhino is reflected but intentionally cropped such that the wings do not appear in the puddle, reminding us that the rhino is, after all, a rhino and nothing more.

I then changed the wings to butterfly’s wings as I felt they were more eye-catching and I wanted to draw more attention to it. I also increased the contrast on the overall image to imitate chiaroscuro in order to bring a more dramatized energy to the overall piece.

At this point in time, I was rather stuck on what I should do with the background. I didn’t want it to be too attention-grabbing such that it would take away from the focus of the composition. I began to think about the original idea of using mirrors instead, and thought of how the mirrored rooms in circuses could also carry the same concept.

This is the final composition. Keeping the concept the same, the image of the rhino is reflected in the mirrors, but now it is more apparent that the butterfly wings have been left out intentionally, to evoke a surrealistic quality to the work.

Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space – Interstellar, 2014

From the get-go, I knew I wanted to show a contrast between the element of ‘love’ and the element of ‘time and space’. Visually, love was simple enough to portray – an image of a heart does the trick. However, to portray the idea of time and space on a still 2-dimensional image was a little more difficult. I went to look at how certain scenes in the movie sought to portray it and came across this:

In this scene where Cooper attempts and interdimensional handshake, the image is distorted to a high degree. In many films that depict time travel, the same imagery is also used. As such, I also wanted to attempt a level of distortion in my composition to bring out that idea.

To portray the idea of love, I firstly used the sparrow as the main subject matter. Unlike most animals, sparrows are monogamous and remain with their partners throughout their lives. I then distorted the image such that there would be 2 heads occupying the same body, signifying harmony and unity of two creatures. Lastly, the imagery of a heart is used to depict literal love, and this is made to stand out from the background with a negative space of a triangle, which is a shape that portrays stability.

To portray the idea of time and space, and our ‘not being able to perceive the dimensions of time and space’, I decided to distort the overall image of the birds and the clouds. I decided to use a more geometric kind of distortion (as opposed to the organic, fluid one used in the movie) because I wanted it to be as jarring as possible.

Somewhere in there I also inverted the tones on the clouds to add a more surrealistic feel to the composition.

After consultation with Shirley, she advised me to tone down the background because it was competing visually with the main subject matter and so I made it less dark.

Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange. – Inception, 2010

The main focus of this piece is subtle surrealistic elements, to portray the whole idea of ‘not realizing that something was actually strange’. After playing with animals in my previous compositions, I wanted to bring in people as the subject matter.

I first came up with this, introducing subtle strange elements like the repetition of the eyes, arms and legs. And also layering – notice how the woman is standing in front of the man, but also behind him (skirt, arms). I then wanted to incorporate the dream element, and so included the large eye in the sky. The eye and the barren landscape indicate a sense of being awake in an environment that we are not usually awake in – a dreamlike world.

However, I found that my composition was too static due to everything being centrally aligned. So I sought to make it more asymmetrical:

I tried this at first but this just made the eye look like it’s winking.

I then thought about adding another strange element to off-centre the composition. I chose the elephant because it is an animal that we associate with largeness, and instead made it to be smaller than the height of the man’s knee. Playing with proportions here add to the surrealistic element as well.

An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. – Inception, 2010

Two quotes from Inception, but that’s okay because it is an amazing movie.

I really love this quote because it speaks volumes about the way we as humans interpret information and the nature of which we receive information about the world around us. Oftentimes, we get ideas about things, but one must realize that our ideas are not always original. In the movie, ideas are artifically implanted into the minds of people via experts. In the real world, we subconsciously implant ideas into our own minds via what we see in our every day life. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always receiving information through out interactions with the world, and we are always subconsciously influenced by these ideas, whether we like to or not.

Instinctively, I went for the imagery of a chimpanzee because they are human-like, intelligent animals. But after playing with the composition for a while it didn’t really make sense to use a chimpanzee. Scrap that.

I then went literal with my interpretation (HIV virus texture) to see what I could get out of it, but that didn’t make sense either. Scrap that too.

Then I thought it all out properly and went back to my own interpretation of the quote – the idea of implanting ideas and memories into a person and came up with this:By the use of repetition, the group of men all have the same thought/idea (represented by a rubik’s cube) implanted into their minds. The large hand is made to be ambiguous. The identity of the hand is left unknown – could it be the hand of God? Could it be the hand of one of the men in the image? Either way, due to the intervention of this hand, all the men are thinking the same thing, a highly contagious idea.

Again, I found my old habits coming to play and my composition was too centrally composed. I consciously tried to break out of that by adjusting my elements:

In the end, I used the HIV virus texture as a background to give everything a little more context. And the hand has now moved to the edge of the composition to create asymmetry.

Overall, it was really fun interpreting the quotes into a visual composition, and I got to explore a different kind of aesthetic than I was used to. It was a little scary leaving aesthetic elements up to a google search, but the world wide web is such a big place that you can almost always get the picture you need.

For future generations that have to go through this project too, there is an open source photoshop action that turns your images into an ‘engraved’ image. Looks like this:

Available here

You’re welcome.

Of course it is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

The thing about memories and old photographs is that as time goes by, what you remember of what you remember becomes less concrete in your head, and you begin to make up your own realities and construct your own past.

All babies look the same – kind of. So when we look at old photographs that don’t belong to us, we kind of place ourselves in that scene, and so begins a process of memory construction.

Processed with VSCO with a5 preset — All babies look the same. This could very well be you

To really remove the identity of the person in the photograph, I thought of ‘erasing’ the facial features of said person in the photograph by physical means. Rubbing it off with turpentine seems to do the trick.

There are other methods too – like erasing, sand papering, liquid papering it off, but I really like that the turpentine preserves the original skin tone, and is easier to control (makes it easy to go for small, detailed areas).

Robert also threw out some ideas about physical alterations of photographs, and this really caught my eye:

polaroid-lifts — Polaroid emulsion lifts

I think this would tie in really well with the whole idea of memory being a distant thing, memories being distorted and ethereal etc. The instructions were fairly easy – plunge in hot water, put in cold water. But actually doing it was another thing in itself.

Plunged in hot water for a while. Some parts of the backing kind of flaked off but nope, nothing happened

Then went looking for alternatives and recalled a photo-transferring process I’ve heard of before –

I think I’m heading in the right direction, but perhaps a thinner layer of varnish (it was too thick, so I wasn’t as close to the thin, fragile effect of polaroid emulsions).

Conversations with Myself

Artist’s Statement

There is something very affecting about old photographs. You’re transported back into a slice of time, one that is a part of a hazy reservoir of long-forgotten memories. The inevitable side-effect of time travel is that you can’t help but make comparisons between Life back then and Life at the present time, and perhaps Life worked out for you and these memories evoke a sense of pleasant nostalgia. Or perhaps not.

In Conversations with Myself, Nguyen explores photographic evidence of her childhood, drawing parallels between Life^before and Life^now. In the series, Nguyen imagines speaking to her younger self through the photographs as an act of affirmation, of validation, of questioning and (not) finding answers. The viewer, then, is invited into the intimate world of the artist, to feel, to empathise, to hear her voice in your head. And perhaps after some time, the voice of the artist blends and morphs into a more familiar one, your voice.

I began approaching this project in the specific sequence of coming up with text (channeling thoughts and feelings) before searching for an appropriate photograph that could accurately complement the text.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Preparatory notes before embarking. Each section is a collection of individual trains of thought. I highlighted phrases that I thought would be good.

However, it became too restrictive after a certain point and so the process evolved to become a more organic one – first looking at photographs, then capturing my stream of consciousness in textual form, trying to vividly recollect details of the moment, and picking (sometimes altering) the most affecting phrase.

It felt good, in a way, to really allow myself to feel what I needed to feel and in a way, it was liberating to put it down on paper. It is only with great hopes that the emotional baggage translates itself through the text and the images.

I will talk about a few –

The choice to create film stills out of photographs was really one that is instinctive, so I wouldn’t say that too much thought has gone into it. But I suppose it works because the photographs are frozen slices of life, that when ‘subtitled’, becomes more than a still moment – it extends and taps into the dimension of time, without being altered from its frozen state.

The choice to include Chinese versions of the text, however, is a conscious one. Not only does it effectively mimic styles of film projection, it also adds a certain dimension to its English counterpart. The Chinese language, to me, is one that is very romantic, and there are certain things that you can only say in the language that will not carry the same meaning as it does in English.

In the above photograph (if one were able to read both texts), the viewer gains additional context of the statement (它们就在你身旁 – they’re right next to you).

This one says “Don’t expect any more from him.” and “He’s not going to support you anymore.”

I really enjoyed this visually – how blurry the photograph is, how little it shows, yet the curve in the eyes and the stoutness of the nose says so much and shows so much that the subject is smiling.

There is a short string of photos that through the series that run on a more positive note – a more encouraging, supportive one, as if a subtle, constant reminder that everything is going to be okay and that things will turn out all right in the end.

This one is my favourite. Something about the absolute innocence, and the telling carefree-ness of the child, that makes the text all more powerful.

Misc 3 — First experiment with physical alteration of the photograph

I really wanted to strip away my identity in this particular photo, to really emphasize the idea of ‘not birth’ and of death. Eventually, I found that the flowers (chrysanthemums) was the most elegant way to go about it, and the most symbolic too, with chrysanthemums being representative of death in the Chinese culture.

Erasing did not work so well on this paper type

I also wanted to strip away the identity of my father in this photo. Symbolically, to portray my lack of emotional attachment to the man. Purposefully, in the hopes that the viewer may be able to empathise with text and visual, and draw their own connections without being hindered by an unfamiliar face.

Here are the rest-

I have decided on this final arrangement. The series has no linear narrative, so it is acceptable to let your eyes jump from one image to another. The last piece however, is intentionally left face down on the ground – to evoke a sense of mystery, of questioning, of this-is-so-upsetting-already-how-worse-can-it-get?

The images are placed at a child’s height too, as if presented to my younger self.

The viewer discovers the fallen piece, an out of curiosity, picks it up.

Overall, the series is meant to evoke sympathy, with the hopes of evoking empathy as viewers try to put themselves in my shoes.

Post-evaluation: I had a thought, though, that the images are only affecting simply because those viewing it knew me personally. And thus it was easier for them to form an emotional attachment to the piece. What about strangers, then, who do not know me?

I employed my friend (in white) to approach a stranger (I could not approach the stranger because then that would establish an emotional attachment already) to ask what she felt when looking through the pieces.

It was as I feared. The stranger was not able to connect with several of the images. But she did find a few rather powerful, so that’s okay. I can live with that.