“Brush and ink are only servants of thoughts and emotion. They should follow your emotion and change with the emotion.” – Wu GuanZhong
This post is about the concept and ideas behind my work for 2D project, My line is emo.
I began with my all-time-struggle, being away from home.
1.Diaspora
- The dispersion or spread of any people from their original homeland.
- people who have spread or been dispersed from their homeland.
Being away from one’s homeland can result in various emotions. Firstly, having a new culture and lifestyle can be overwhelming, and the warmth and joy found at home turns into longliness and longing. Secondly, fitting into a foreign culture is never easy, through out the process one would likely experience uneasiness, alienation and detachment. Besides that, the prejudice between the locals and foreigners sometimes result in bitterness and tension.
For uneasiness , I tried to make marks using cooked instant noodles. Which appears quite often in my first few month alone in Singapore. The material captures the uneasiness of living alone in a country, not knowing where to get food or how to order food in english.
For alienation/detachment, I took Huimin’s suggestion and looked into materials that does not mix together.
Firstly, I tried waxing the paper:
In the picture above, the waxing is not thorough enough , I wasn’t satisfied with the result and tried a few more with different thickness of the wax layer and different application of ink, until i obtained the result below:
The patterns formed by the ink is almost painting a broken surface, the thin jagged lines is a good representation of the struggles the foreigners face to connect with the people.
Another material I tried was oil. The following are the several experimental pieces I’ve done.
The satisfied result is the one below, which is obtained by applying ink onto paper, and quickly dripping ink onto the surface. Then, roll the ink around the surface by tilting the paper. The idea of ink being unable to penetrate the paper represent the idea of not being able to fit into the foreign society. The drop of ink traveling on the paper represent an individual, traveling alone, suggesting the sense of solitude.
I also decided to include some methods from the previous post.
The mark made using cling wrap can be used to represent homesickness. Me eating alone always result in having left overs. The cling wrap reminds me of the meals I had when my family is not around, hence suggest the loneliness as well as homesickness.
The cut across the paper surface will be used to suggest bitterness, the subtle appearance and the suggested violence can be used to suggest the bitterness I feel when I hear nasty and prejudiced comment between the locals and the foreigners.
2.home away from home
- (idiomatic) A place in which one is as comfortable as one’s actual home.
After being here in Singapore for quite some time, fitting in is no longer a problem. However, identity crisis surfaces as I started to behave more and more like a local. My memory of my hometown fades as I grow more and more familiar with the land that is supposedly foreign to me. I found myself “betraying” my roots and felt a sense of guilt, which lead to my refusal to accept my new identity. This denial then turns into emotional struggle and conflict.
I mixed paper clay with ink to dye it black, and applied a thick layer of the mixture on to paper. When it dries, the clay dries , and some parts fell off. Taking clay as a representation of earth, this piece suggest the feeling of losing connection to one’s roots, and thus the identity that comes with it. The broken surface also suggest the emotional impact that comes with the loss.
While thinking about the conflict, the first thing that came to mind is trash bag.The texture is able to show the act of stretching clearly, and evoke the sense of internal struggles. Trash bag also carries meanings on its own. It suggests the state of not being wanted by both places. I can neither be a 100% local of Singapore, nor go back to being a true Taiwanese.
Other materials are tracing paper, which suggests distance and fading memories.
During individual consultation with Joy she introduce me to the Ted Talk below.
As someone who is away from home, I find the following quote from the talk very relatable.
“Perhaps my biggest problem with coming from countries is the myth of going back to them.I’m often asked if I plan to “go back” to Ghana. I go to Accra every year, but I can’t “go back” to Ghana…. We can never go back to a place and find it exactly where we left it. Something, somewhere will always have changed,most of all, ourselves. People.”
The speaker also highlighted that we tend to assume someone’s identity based on where they came from, when the identity is in fact build with experiences from all the different places that and individual had live in. Hence, one need not to be confined by the culture of his/her hometown.
Which remind me of the Two Fridas by Frida Kahlo, in which the artist confront the duality of her identity, and accept the fact that the different cultures co-exist within her, while admitting the importance of each of them.
which lead me to the thought:Perhaps the attitude of local is not the only thing that separates the foreigners from fitting in.
Sometimes, the foreigners refuse to accept their own identity as outsider, resulting in unhappy interactions with the locals. Other times, the foreigners refuse to even try to fit in with the local, because they refuse to accept the new culture.
With those thoughts in mind, I went on and look through a few artists who dealt with diaspora and related issues. The following artists caught my attention.
Brailliterate (文盲文) by Xu Bing, 1993
(click image to get more info)
In this work, the artist play with different form of languages to evoke the issue of misinterpretation and misunderstanding due to the difference in culture.
I find the work relatable. Being friends of both the local and the foreigners, I sometimes witness the misinterpretation or prejudice caused by difference in culture and language here in Singapore. This prompted me to shift my thoughts towards the interactions between the locals and foreigners.
Maybe some of the conflict and tension between can be resolved, as long as one switch their perspective around or change their attitude. Such idea can be suggested by making different marks using the same material, by changing the application method.
During my experimentation, I realised that thinner paper tends to warp, even though the warping shows poor craftsmanship, but I think it can be a metaphor of the influence and impact of emotions on an individual.
Another artist that inspired me (more in terms of style and visual) is Wu Guan Zhong.
The simplicity and his use of negative space inspired me to reconsider the format and overall presentation of my work.