Art history essay introduction & paragraphs draft

Topic: Chinese tomb art & Shang bronzes

I try to narrow down the statement as suggested. There might be some changes in phrasing but here is what I have gotten so far.

INTRODUCTION

Ancient Chinese tombs are valuable historic evidence of the life in the past. The belief in afterlife prompted the royal family to build tombs as their palaces in another life. Thus, all sorts of objects, animals and even human beings were buried with their owners as to provide a comfortable afterlife. Among them, bronzes were commonly found in various types. Chinese bronzes dates back from the late Neolithic era, matured in late Shang dynasty, till the Tang dynasty and it is called the Bronze Age due to its advanced & sophisticated standard. The bronzes served multiple purposes back then and reflect various aspects of the society. The bronzes from early to late Shang dynasty changed in types, technique, design and etc. This indicates how development impacts on bronzes as well as how the design decisions were made more intentionally.

The technology improved enabled the possibility of changes of the bronzes. Image on the left is a bronze vessel with beast face pattern from the early Shang. It is a ritual wine ware called ‘Jue’ in Chinese. It has a pointy spout, a long extruded handle and it stands on three tall thin legs. On the right there are the famous square vessel with four rams from late Shang(1300-1046 BC) and the close-up of the patterns. It was also a ritual wine ware and it is the largest square vessel intact.

Firstly, the Jue has a very rough & simple shape compared with the elegant & complicated square vessel with four extruding rams. While the Jue has only plain beast pattern on the body, the square vessel has intricate patterns from top to the bottom of the vessel. One leg of the Jue is perpendicular to the body due to premature of the casting techniques. The technique was fully developed when they cast the square vessel. The rams and dragons were first cast and then the entire vessel was made with highly intricate patterns.

Essay Proposal

Essay Topic: What is Chinese tomb art? Compare two bronzes from the Shang dynasty.

Sources of information:

National Museum of China website
The Palace Museum of China
Books: Early Chinese Art from Tombs& Temples, The Arts of China, Art in China
etc.

Tentative Structure of essay

Introduction of Chinese Tomb Art:

Origin of Chinese Tomb Art
Chinese tomb art is funerary art
Belief in afterlife, religion, human sacrifice
Types of vessels
Skills & materials
Functions: Daily usage; ritual used (Who were they dedicated to)
Values of the tomb art & development

The Shang Dynasty Bronzes:

Introduction of bronzes from Shang dynasty(3 stages)
Types ( including vessels, weapons, musical instruments, implements, agricultural tools, horse and chariot fittings and all sorts of everyday objects. )
Comparison between two bronzes. One from the early stage and the other from a later stage when the techniques were developed & mature.
Comparing on techniques, patterns, types, change of focus etc.
What are the meanings behind the changes & differences

A simple drinking vessel from early Shang & the famous Square vessel (fang zun) with four rams from late Shang

Possible statement:

The bronzes are a manifestation of the politics, economics, culture and life of their time; a time capsule concept

WEEK 1: Journal

There are many different methods to learn something. Everyone learns differently. For me, I feel that it’s easier to learn and understand the knowledge better through a more interactive way. For example, learning through images is better than reading wordy text for me. And a logically arranged content is easier to read than a random one. Besides, instead of purely listening method, I feel that knowledge are bettered learnt through interactive manners and experiencing the process. It turns out that the memory lasts longer as well. Sometimes it is good to learn on my own and figure it out myself as I can think calmly and thoroughly. However, when studying among groups, we can learn from each other when everyone notices different points.

SAM Visit

On a rainy Friday afternoon, I left ADM and arrived at Singapore Art Museum, aka SAM. Among the numerous pieces in the 3 exhibitions, there were 2 in particular I found fascinating.

Here's who I am, I am what you see
BY EZZAM RAHMAN
From President's Young Talents Exhibition

Inside a dark room were many glass jars on several tables, inside which there was a flower and a light shining from below. At first glance from distance, they seemed like dry flowers displayed nicely in light.

I discovered that they were made out of skin when I moved and looked closer. There were in fact many different shapes of them. The setting somehow made me think that the artist valued these flowers and the number of them was quite impressive considering how long it might take to collect and made them. It made me wonder why the artist would spend time on this and what he was trying to convey. As we know, this were quite uncommon materials to use to make art work to put into a glass jars. However, the artist managed to create beautiful flowers out of them. All these flowers were part of the artist and they were born via the patient and tedious process.

After reading the text and background on the artist…

I think the choice of materials did reflect well on the title of the artwork. The skin belonged to the artist and it was unique and very personal just as he said “These works are representations of self, about that impermanent moment of someone’s presence.” The flowers were kept in the jars now seemed like a museum of displaying someone’s existence and the time that the person experienced.

They were captured and placed there and appeared very delicate yet elegant. The nice environment of warm light inside a dark room also created a nostalgic atmosphere. Everyone experiences the metabolism process in life and everyone eventually dies and disappears in the stream of history. This was quite obvious when noticing the changes happening to our body. However short the moments were, they could be very beautiful and precious.

Every Point of View
BY MATTHEW NGUI
From 5 Star Exhibition

This piece was installed inside a room. When I entered the door, in front of me were many white PVC pipes with incomplete words on them. Walking among the pipes, the texts on them seemed to change. I tried to move around and shrift my height of view to see whether I could read anything out. As I was exploring in the room full of pipes, I found that there were several cameras placed at different corners in the room and then in the far end of the room there was walls of projection.

It was a pleasant surprise to actually see clearly the words on the pipes were presenting some statements on Democracy. These must be viewed at some very specific angles so that all the pipes became continuous as a background. Interestingly, the pipes present different statements on Democracy when viewed at different perspectives. When there were people walking around among the pipes, the text will be blocked as well. As it turned out that they were real-time video projection.

After reading the text and background on the artist…

Now that I understood the intention of the artist of stressing the importance of the perspective, the pipes and live-cameras installation made sense. The instability and fragile states of Democracy were experienced by the visitors as a slight change of position will cause the loss of the views. Just as it was stated that the artist sees the work as “analogous” to the democratic process: that democracy “is an understanding that different viewpoints exist and that it is within this acknowledgment that ways to co-exist are devised consensually and sometimes, not so.”

However, the write-up stated that “Every Point of View invokes the multi-pillared Parthenon in Athens, coincidentally the birthplace of democracy as an ideal and practice.” This was not that transparent when visitors were exploring in the installation. As much as Democracy was associated with Athens, the pipes were quite different from the columns from the Parthenon.

4D In Class Exercise: Groovy Steps

The dance based on going on a trip

Firstly hesitating and thinking,

Then looking around

Finally starting to walk and jumping joyfully…

Previous Semester 4D project: https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/linc0013/2015/09/24/journey-videodraft-thoughts/

EGO Process

Process for each line

The first line is based on photograph of the cats as shown below. With the outline drawn out, colors were added as well. The square boxes were then added but with some parts erased to create an illusion of distance. The cats were drawn in a very flat 2d style so the boxes may help to create sense of space. The second one also contained a yarn ball photoshoped from a photograph. For the last one, the ball in front was applied with motion blur…

For the second line, as mentioned, it was about manipulation of blending modes of layers and colors. Variation to be chosen potentially was shown below.

And a simple cut-down process is as shown below. Starting with textured background, arranging the silhouettes of animals so that they look balanced and assigned colors to them. Then changed some of the blending modes of the layers and then duplicate the entire composition, rotated or fliped to explore…as well as changing colors and blending modes.

There were lots of trials and errors in the process and frankly speaking quite challenging to achieve the right balance of cold and warm, solid and translucent colors…but they turned out good. And it is in fact efficient in a sense that you could get three very different outcomes through editing one file.

For the third line…the image of the hands was actually my very first tryout on this project. The bright yellow and lighter blue is contrasting well but somehow I felt there was something missing.

So after a while I went on with another design but with the same concept of a melting sugar cube. The processes were shown below and it was quite self-explanatory.

And for the word “Perseverance” I wanted to show the concept just through making a tedious and time-consuming design.

It started with a simple square on a grey background and all that left was repetition of duplication, rotation and scaling. After that colors were added and as well as the white highlight.

Below is another tedious design…

And the process:

The last line made use of photoshoping on photograph as well and emphasized on details.

Below were some of the images found on the Internet and were editted. There were many clean convenient illustrations of the buildings and landmarks but I didn’t use that because a photograph contained so much more details and textures.

For the image below, I wanted a futuristic/sci-fi feel to it. Below were different color versions as well as the reversed ones.

Process:

And similarly, the third image was a combination of the other two. Below were the variation of them, including the night versions and the day version.

EGO inspiration

Besides Nakamura Yusuke, I also went to the library and looked through the entire collection shown above. There were so many different and distinct styles that they have and I believed that some of them influence the design decisions I made later on in the projects. There were artists who use only solid bright colors, bizarre combination of colors as well as playing with texts……and besides this I flipped through some on the minimalists as well…Since there were too many of them…I don’t want to fill the whole page with references. Instead I would like to share how I got inspired with a few examples.

First thing I noticed was that it is safe to play with monochrome and in many cases mix with black&white. The bigger the range in brightness or saturation determine the contrast of the image. And in the case of the bottom left image, since the background and the hand is similar blue, the bright white naturally becomes the focus and the first thing viewers notice.

In order to make the colors less dull but without risking too much…we can add an appropriate portion of the color adjacent to the main color. As you can see in the first and second images. The slight change of tone gives layers to the images.

The third image is a combination of photograph and solid colors. It also reminded me of the art from Bauhaus period with the popular usage of blue, yellow, red and white.

There are also minimalist style with simplest shape to describe the objects and bold black outline.

For the second image on the bottom row, it is a very bizarre yet nicely-balanced design. I am not sure if I am anywhere near to the right answer. But, I assumed that it is due to the big portion of black/dark background and the balance between each colors. Also the very contrasting colors may seem far on the color wheel but yet similar in either saturation or value.

There is this artist that designed all the album covers for the singer group called Binaria. I couldn’t really find any more information on the artist but as you can see above, the colors were very nice in each of them. As compared to Nakamara, these are duller and more netural colors. But also similar in amounts of details and line work in some of them.

Besides I was also inspired by many album covers of various artists and I studied how they played with colors and contrast…etc.

THE END

EGO Artist Inspiration -Nakamura Yusuke

I have always liked the artwork by Japaneses artist named Nakamura Yusuke. He was a graphic artist. Nakamura’s art has been featured along with various other forms of media. And probably most known for his designs for Tomihiko Morimi‘s The Tatami Galaxy and Yoru wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome.

Above is a screenshot of some of his artwork. As you can see there are the clean, simple but fine line work and very bold use of colors. He uses mostly solid colors instead of gradients and many of his illustrations are black&white line work against saturated colors. I have always admired his style since he did all the album covers for the band called asian kungfu generation. Below is a screenshot of the google search result for AKG album. He did a tremendous amount of art work that he became so sophisticated in the ways he played with colors.

EGO Final

EGO

As shown below, these are my final panels.With the sequence of:ME, BETTER ME, IDEAL ME &ME IN 5 YEARS. The prints turned out good as I did a test print prior to this and adjusted them accordingly.

First Line is one based with cat images. For one reason that I like cat and for another are their characters. Inspired by my research, I tried to play with bright, saturated colors in the contrast with black&white.

CURIOSITY

A curious looking cat was tilting its head in the image and one of its hand reaching forward. I am always curious about many stuffs and most of time very keen to learn new and interesting things. Also, quite often I feel confused and sometimes lost… This image has both flat colors as well as gradient, which was kind of my focus of experiment for this line.

+

Passion/Craziness

I feel very passionate about the things that I really like and enjoy doing them. Just like when a cat sees a ball of yarn! Red is also the color for passion. I can keep on doing the thing that I love for hours without feeling tired or distracted sometimes skipping meals…it’s a good thing to be concentrated but also sort of crazy as my friends said.

=

ME

So adding the two distinct traits…is me. This is a popular internet image of the cat titled as ”I regret nothing!” Red and green as you all know, are complimentary colors and many times they look horrible together when they are both very saturated. Somehow when they are similar in a less saturated but lighter, everything looks balanced, which I assumed were to the yellow and blue-green colors that linked red and green.

Adventurous/Bold

As shown above, there are many animal silhouettes in the panel, as I always associate animals with wild & adventures. For this line, there actually consist of same layers but they were blended and combined in different ways to achieve different moods. The first one is colorful and highly saturated as well as dark black colors. It’s about being bold and also confidence with what we are doing.

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Negativity/Darkness

Everyone has his/her own dark side…I tend to be pessimistic deep inside and sometimes I feel depressed, which is not beneficial at all. It would be impossible to only purely joyful and positive all the time…Still I believe minus some portion of the negativity there will be a better me.

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A Better Me

Here is a version of the same composition with brighter and delightful colors. If you notice, there is actually less black color but still some. The colors also have a better variety in comparison to the first one, which I think represent a better me.

For the third line, I wanted to try a simpler and minimalist style as the ones above were very colorful and busy.

Dream

This was inspired by a melting sugar cube in a cup of hot tea that I was drinking. Dream is represented by the sugar cube, although slowly, it melts and the sweetness spreads. Dream is slowly coming true.

X

Perseverance

This image was created from a simple square by rotating and scaling them, and then I add different colors onto the pattern and made it faded away at the sides. The background was not white but very light grey so the contrast of saturated colors and white colors on grey was very interesting and created a solid feel in the middle and a softer one at the side.

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An Ideal Me

Combining the two things will complete an ideal me…With numerous grids and lines and the fuzzy background of black and grey. There is same grey background like the previous one and the ellipse, which even though is not the brightest white, seems very bright and the highlight of the whole composition. The concept of this is that there is both brightness and darkness but with hardwork, one will eventually shine.

For the last line, it is about 5 years in the future…I created two images and overlay them in a way that it looks different with another style.

Travel

As shown in the images, there are landmarks of many countries arranged together. They were all based on actual photos so that they consist of great amount of details. With a much less saturated background, there are 6 colorful bright paper planes icons, which represent travelling.

+ or –

Work

In 5 years, I believe there will be great difference in the ways people work as technology develops. That explains the sci-fi feeling background, but it was combined with traditional tools such as sketchbooks paper and Copic Marker, which were fading away slowly. The three icons in the middle were toolbox, light bulb and a brief case. They represented designing work, idea-based work and a brief case of course symbolized professionalism.

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Me In 5 Years

Therefore, the combination of the two images brought the whole picture of a possibility of me in 5 years. The colors were contrasting against each other as well as the dark background. It probably hinted that I will be working late at nights.