Month: February 2016

Point of Views

February 28, 2016 by Junyuan·2 Comments

When it comes to 18 of them, which one should I add the s? POINT? Or VIEW?

How to think of 18 point of views of any subject? First, start with something not specific. Then, find something everyone can related to, so perspective ensured to exist. Followed by something I have different point of view from the common point of views. Thus, I came out with something I extremely relied on as much as my computer, le PEN.

My definition of a pen is, it produce lines of any ink, it can fill up any given 2-dimensional space, it has a hard tip for user-friendly, and it is not a pencil. Yeah, this is somehow a little unnecessary explanation but I just want it clear before I put out my list of POVs. Feel free to read and I’ll see you at the bottom of the list.

A PEN from the point of view of CIVILIZATION is TOOL OF COMMUNICATION

A PEN from the point of view of CHILD is PENCIL YOU CAN’T ERASED

A PEN from the point of view of CALLIGRAPHER is MUSIC INSTRUMENT

A PEN from the point of view of WRITER is PAINTBRUSH

A PEN from the point of view of MONK is MEDITATION

A PEN from the point of view of DRUMMER is DRUMSTICK

A PEN from the point of view of PENTURNERS is ART

A PEN from the point of view of CRITIC is SWORD

A PEN from the point of view of PHILOSOPHER is ENGINEERS TO SCIENTISTS

A PEN from the point of view of PAINTER is CHISEL

A PEN from the point of view of BUSINESSMAN is SEAL OF APPROVAL

A PEN from the point of view of LAWYER is GUN

A PEN from the point of view of STUDENT is BOW AND ARROW

A PEN from the point of view of GAMBLER is CHANCE

A PEN from the point of view of SCIENTIST is CAMERA

A PEN from the point of view of POLITICIAN is WMD

A PEN from the point of view of INVENTOR is IGNITION

A PEN from the point of view of MUSICIAN is ACRYLICS

A PEN from the point of view of PROCRASTINATOR is MOTIVATOR

A PEN from the point of view of ME is MIND PROJECTOR

Had fun? You may heard of some of the sentences as they are universal facts. What I am trying to do express is I focused on human occupations since pen is such an important tool to these particular aspect require a civilized system of communication we called written language. IT is fun to explore and conclude generically how such small tool can be a great deal when different users is holding it.

Since we’re in a course that emphasized on conceptual results, it’s never too troubled to think of another idea. I thought of the most used color in human civilization, or rather this continent of the world, RED. Due to how much man-made culture had utilized it, red is almost everywhere. As a matter of fact, RED is in our blood. So, spare some time to read through my POVs of the color, RED.

A RED from the point of view of KID is LEADER

A RED from the point of view of TEACHER is AUTHORITY

A RED from the point of view of CLOTHING LINE is UNISEX

A RED from the point of view of TECHNICIANS is DANGER

A RED from the point of view of PARENTS is VIOLENCE

A RED from the point of view of CHINESE is PROSPERITY

A RED from the point of view of ALCOHOLICS is WINE

A RED from the point of view of FEMINIST is STRENGTH

A RED from the point of view of DOCTOR is BLOOD

A RED from the point of view of NATURE is SEDUCTION

A RED from the point of view of ADVERTISERS is EYE-CATCHING

A RED from the point of view of CHEF is DELICIOUS

A RED from the point of view of DESIGNERS is FF0000

A RED from the point of view of EYE is ATTENTION

A RED from the point of view of FRUIT LOVER is SWEET

A RED from the point of view of FOOD LOVER is HOT

A RED from the point of view of SCIENTIST is 620-750

A RED from the point of view of LOVERS is COMPASSION

This time the POVs are covering different aspects in cultural phenomenon instead of focusing on human occupation. This is because I found RED was already part of the universal, therefore I inserted other object to interact with the color, like the nature and eye. I’ve also included specified groups of people like alcoholics, feminist, advertisers, and lovers to give it a different tone to the collections.

However, as an unspoken and unexplained law of the human mind stated, when you are able to think it, someone else must’ve thought it. Apparently, there are other fellow course-mates had the same idea. So, in order to let my work stand out, and not a “just-another-similar-thing”, the style of execution is vital.

In terms of style, I’ve looked through the web with websites like 9gag and a modern artist related site call the Illustration Web, which is like a dating site, except, this is for freelance graphic artist/illustrators and commissioners.

(Feel free to google the names in the collages.)

The medium I have in mind are illustration, which was greatly (almost over-)used by everyone else. Perhaps it is because many point of views included human characters, and illustration is the most practical to express human figures. So, I would like to try some stylized designs of my human characters. The styles I found interesting is these particular artists, as they did their characters in an unconventional ways to prove their styles are unique and hope that they’re recognizable. Although like how classical art were considered common in their time, (I heard there are plenty of artist had the same styles as Vermeer in his period.) their names hardly stand out, but their efforts and attributes of creating a special characters are worth to learn.

Next I have to consider about lines and how to shape out my compositions. There are plenty of illustrators love to used insanely intricate lines to wow their viewers, and yet some of them can do by performing instant strokes to form a figure. Less is more? It can’t be decided objectively.

Compositions is the key to this project. There’s a need to be abstract yet able to communicate with audience instantly. Even if the work cannot show a literal context, it must at least keep the audience interested. At least, this is what I see from the art above.

Lastly, the color. For either subjects I had in mind, I planned to use different coloring methods. For PEN, I planned to use digital coloring, or the complicated coloring styles from the images. As for RED, I intended to make the compositions black in white and only color the red objects, or maybe VICE VERSA.

In conclusion of my research, there are still a lot more to test and possibly I can decide once I came up with the experimental drafts. My fellow classmates have given good advice that ended up into my explanation above. Since I love illustration works too so I am excited to see what will be the end results, or at least, end decision.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!

Say My Name….

February 22, 2016 by Junyuan·0 Comments

You’re God**** right. —- Walter White, Breaking Bad. (Not a fan yet, just because it kinda fits.)

Project 1, TYPOGRAPHIC Portrait Problem has finally ended, and there goes my first presentation of the semester.

So, to make up the whole progress, I’m gonna start from where I stopped.

I’m not a big nerd on architecture, so I decided to stay as an interested audience of the art of buildings and cut off the composition from my set to fit the 4-frame-project. Moreover, filling up the building’s shape did not work as strong as my other compositions in terms of subtleties, and fine tip pens are not challenging enough either. Cutting away the pedestrian paths and underground tunnels are due to the potentially overcrowded components. Since its idea was started from the escalator itself, so I just simplified it as the medium is a tough tool to control as well.

TYPOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PROBLEM

My Name is

and I’m a logical person.

During my city exploration, I was unable to use internet data or GPS due to my financial restrictions. Thus, all I can rely on from getting lost are the locality maps from the MRT stations, and the STREET SIGNS on my way. This method of navigating shows my logical attributes when finding my way in the city.

Once I am familiarized with addressing format of a town, I won’t worry about not finding the certain locations as these street signs aided me big time. Also, I think I got my directional sense from my dad, so retracing my route was never a problem either. (Unless the scale and complexity of the city was too overwhelming.) I’ve paired the idea with collage making, the medium used by DADA when they first establish. Therefore, I considered it as a form of real life photoshopping as it requires certain amount of logic to piece every component together. The street signs are chosen based on all the streets I’ve been during my stay in Singapore. Some were photographed on the spot, some were screen-shot from the blessed Google Street, therefore resulted the major difference in their brightness. To find my name, just simply spell out the missing letters that were replaced by the white boxes, and you’ll be logically reading my name, just as the piece intended to be.

However, it certainly has flaws. From the feedback of my fellow classmates, they were distracted by the sign posts thinking that my name hide between the negative spaces. After my clarification, they liked the idea of hiding what I wanted to show in this typographic portrait.

My Name is

and I’m not afraid to be weird in front of the citizens.

Why the caption? This is because I often (not always) ask stupid questions when I’m exploring around the city. I am thankful to every pedestrians who’ve helped me when I was confused or oblivious about the directions. (Yes, despite how confident I sounded just now, that do happens.)

There are different faces in every trip, and I definitely can’t remember how they all look like, that’s why I chose to design them in monochromatic black-clothed figures, which symbolized how rare we meet each other again. I wanted to present many identities, therefore I scratched through all my memories on the streets, in the train, or in certain locations. The figures are designed with identifiable common gestures. There are arranged in a way that you are able to see my surname LOO for a certain distance, which achieved how unrecognizable I was in a big city. The medium I used for this piece is water color. Mistakes made by water color can be easily covered or blended out, thus suiting my piece of not afraid to ask the wrong questions. (Mainly also because I am less likely to see these individual again.)

How my classmates mistaken it as a printed work was a compliment to me, even though some have commented that this was a little out of place among my whole project. Moreover, not everyone are able to see the hidden surname in it. Perhaps a better design need to be implement for a better effect next time.

My Name is

and I’m a confident person.

That’s some big words to say. I believe my confidence are shown clearly in my previous piece, but the confidence is difficult to build. It requires many assuring factors and abilities to form my confidence, just like how the Singapore MRT connects the cities. (This is not an advertisement.)

Testing for the right hue

I resembles confidence with MRT not only due to they’re confident that no station was wasted in terms of utilization, but also due to how confident they are with their arrival time estimation. Back in Malaysia, it was until the 2010s that our public transport placed the arrival time in their clocks as they are constantly late and delayed in the previous decades. Singapore MRT did not disappoint me with its estimated arrival time almost every time. (Yes, almost, because there was some breakdowns.) I picked the piece to represent my middle name JUN as this attribute only can be seen by people who began to know me.

The piece was drawn by Sharpie and Faber Castell’s markers. Their ink penetrates the paper easily therefore it needs to be used lightly. Using it tested my limits in controlling their color tone, perfecting the circles, (I’m still a human after all.)and maintaining the straight lines without any ruler. (Many illustrator are able to do this, so I considered an challenge from my idols.)

The feedback for this are mostly positive, so I was relieved the whole composition worked out. The bigger challenge is to make it recognizable to the viewers but avoid making it too complicated.

My Name is

and I’m a curious person.

An escalator form a bird eyes’ view is how I express my curiosity. During my exploration, most of the MRT are either in the elevated or placed underground. Thus much of my exploration time was spent on this particular transportation. It is the fundamental portal I must go through to see a new street, a new surrounding, and a new city. Within half a minute taking the escalator, my curiosity towards the scenery I’m gonna witness elevated as well for the next 30 seconds. For this new found attribute that’s been hidden a long time, I paired it with my YUAN as it probably can be seen by people who knew me well or solely myself.

To suit such special attribute I found in the escalator and myself, I’ve chose the method of print-making. I’ve cut a template out of a slightly heavier paper and cover a piece of an alphabet shaped paper with the template. I believe my curiosity is not as black as the machine’s original color, so I chose my acrylics as the coloring medium. Acrylics are way thicker that water colors but their saturation resulted a ideal tone for this piece. The thicker they are, the easier it became a disaster. I had to redo a couple of times before I am happy with the end results, and the disaster happened during a desperate times. (the night before submission, my friends.)

Some of my classmates are intrigued by the idea of taking a new perspective for the neglected machine. The overall project was appreciated and I am happy for what I’m able to do with my new limitations. (not doing the film things.) Ms.Joy has commented that the work accomplished its purpose for leading the viewers to a new perspective of my hobby, and it can be further enhanced by placing the piece in different spots.

The work was a success for me despite the aesthetic aspect of my classmate works are better. However, I could learn more in contextualized my future work from the beautiful works of my classmates, through this project. (Perhaps a better time management would be good as well.) As always, I am looking forward to everyone’s next project.

Thanks for reading!

Singapore Diaries

February 21, 2016 by Junyuan·0 Comments

As I returned from my hometown village for Chinese New Year, I was curious about whether there’s a similar kampong in Singapore since Malaysia and Singapore shares a similar cultural history. In Malaysia, there’s hundreds of kampongs just for the Chinese, as they were one of the tactics conducted by the British to isolate the Communist military troops from their families and relatives food supplies and medical aids. We called them Kampung Baru as in New Villages.

Once the keywords, “Singapore kampong” were inserted into the search engine, Google showed plenty of web articles referring the “Last Kampong in Singapore”, Kampong Lorong Buangkor. The results did not surprise me much as it was expected for a developed country like Singapore. However, it intrigued me for being the last spot where I can witness a living history of Singapore’s urbanization. Not to mention, the observable contrast of modernization must be so obvious as it is located in the middle of a town.

During the Valentines Day, I began my search through some taps on Google Maps. A train ride to Khatib and a bus ride to Gerald Drive, within 2 hours, I reached my destinations. Unlike Malaysia’s Kampongs which usually have a big gate welcoming the visitors, Kampong Lorong Buangkor has a sign that points towards their one and only surau. (As shown in the video.)

The housing area was unorganized, there’s no finely paved roads, and there’s not much informative locations I can ask about. That’s why for this first trip to the location, I went stealth mode, which was basically filming the kampong stealthily. Fortunately, no one was standing in the outdoors at 12 noon but me. So, all the from the lorong to the end of the kampong, it was just me with my camera, walking through awkwardly. I did see some villagers on the way but I didn’t establish any conversation. This is because I was wandering about my topics for this project.

The second topic I was considering, was the buskers in Singapore, mainly concentrated in Orchard area. I’ve only found three of the frequent buskers by the time I visited the locations provided by the Internet. It was a raining afternoon which caused many of the buskers stayed home. Few of them who do street performing for living or publicity stayed around their spot while others didn’t show up. There’s another factor that my buskers didn’t go well. It is because I relied on articles and information on the Internet for past times. Many of the sources are at least one year old. Thus, some may have change their locations and did not have a platform to confirm their updates.

Therefore, there’s a few challenges for the future of my Singapore Diaries. Which theme I’m doing? In what format shall I present my narratives? What would be my content and context? And how should I establish them?

There are lots of questions worth brainstorming. So stay tuned….

Hopefully there’s still elements of surprise left…

February 10, 2016 by Junyuan·0 Comments

My concept for typography portrait has finally progressed and an idea worth anticipating is formed. YAY! My new concept is: CITY-BOY, where my personalities are shown in the forms of urban facilities illustrated by various traditional mediums.

City culture is one of the things that KL and Singapore had in common. It shows how far human being had advanced and how human community thrives for a better living. The city shows a more distinct variation of forms and views for me. Don’t get me wrong, I like natural sceneries as well but natural landscapes shows the trails left by the elements; cityscapes shows the trails left by the human society. Therefore I find the city interesting when you can deduce human nature in through their physical creations.

I wanted to explore subtleties again in this project after inspired by Ji Lee’s “Word as Image”. Subtleties wasn’t shown in my last concept even though Ji Lee was one of the artist I’m trying to refer. Therefore I want to make sure that his subtle manipulation of words was in my new concept. While doing so, I also want to try out more traditional mediums since the LINE project in order to step out from my photography media.

Vernacular Typography

I searched for a few sites related to my new ideas. Most of the city/urban typographies shown are the ones produced by citizens for occupation/marketing purpose. Vernacular typography.com and The Journal of Urban Typography tumblr documented many handwritten signs, sprayed signs, billboards, and gold signs in NYC.

The Journal of Urban Typography (tjout@tumblr)

There’s a form of city typography created with special fonts on beautiful city photos. These Instagram-worthy photos did not fit my concepts very well. Later, I caught a glimpse of collage typography which impressed me with its dada-ish and constructivist style.

Collage typography, advanced? version of Constructivist Typography

Some of the G-1 folks also gave me some instant suggestions. (As in what pops up in their head after hearing my title.) Since my arrival in Singapore, I’ve always feel that every outing trip to the cities is like going into a new world. There’s a different atmosphere for each city so I have to think of something that conclude my explorations along with traits I hope to show. I shall choose the aspects of the city that I approached the most. Therefore I picked the following aspects.

Street signs
Public transport
Architectures
People
The public paths: Pedestrian roads, escalators, and tunnels.

These aspects are the ones that show up in every of my trips, and they represented some new traits I’ve never presented. I’ll explain their relevance in the future.

I match these new traits with the traditional mediums’ specialty. Collage making is paired with STREET SIGNS; Sharpie art with PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION; water colors will be the execution for PEOPLE; fine tip suits best with ARCHITECTURE; and print making is matched with THE PUBLIC PATHS.

I wrote the properties for the designs only as I haven’t figure out the details until I have enough resources and experiments. Other problems included my demand of traditional materials, (tools and paper types.) how I plan the color choices, (again) and how to fit/cut my concepts into the newly announced 4-frame-format. Despite all of the above, trials and execution time will be the greatest challenge for this project. Perhaps my future post for this project will include a lot of my fails attempts. Hope not. (Crossing fingers.)

Thanks for reading my renewed conceptualizing stage. See you in my next progress post!

WALKING HOME

February 2, 2016 by Junyuan·0 Comments

How This Is NOT My Home (Yet)

8 A4 size photos on plain papers.

So this was the original title I had in mind. Although not as far as from China, my hometown is far enough to stimulate homesickness. I adapted the hostel living with my own set of routine in order to help me stimulate how I lived in my home sweet home. Yes, home is a comfortable place, but is not always the most exciting place. To show and tell, I decided on using a first person view to let the viewers see what I see. I found using my most wide-angled lens won’t achieved the stimulating effect I wanted, therefore I thought, I should include my arms into the shots as we don’t always put our arms behind our backs. It also created the effect of impossible POV shots, which later responded during the presentation in January 18th.

This is not my home because I woke up knowing my family members is not under the same roof.

This is not my home because my breakfast is almost the same everyday and I can surf the internet while eating without being nagged.

This is not my home because I am paranoid about whether if I locked my door. I invented a way to keep my future-self reminded by leaving a red mark that will last at least 30 minutes with the blades of my keys after I double checked my lock.

This is not my home because this is not the most comfortable place for my personal business.

This is not my home because I have to buy my own meals and definitely having people to eat dinner with isn’t guaranteed. Therefore buying a takeaway to my room is justification of the later.

This is not my home because I get to see my friends whenever I wanted and tend to be more available for hanging outs. Friends have always been the family from outside, they’re the ones that get me through the strangeness in new environments.

This is not my home because I don’t have to maintain the decent tidiness in my bedroom. I developed the habit of throwing my keys on my bed whenever I enter my room. Although it’s a small gesture, but this shows I’m gradually adapting this new HOME-to-be.

This is not my home because taking a shower indicates the end of my day while at home, a shower is a preparation for a trip. A shower have became the moment to recap my day.

For task 2, I edited the photos into a slideshow, accompanied with sounds I’ve collected with my phone, in order to enhance the imitation of my life experiences.

However, there are many limitations in my work, such as what I described for my task 1 are tough to be seen in the photos noted composition without my presentation. In the video, the lack of variation of still images make it hard for viewers to stay through. I intended to show the silence I adapted with sounds but without further informative signs, it can be misinterpreted as showing my loneliness with daily life. I admit there was loneliness in the first few months but I later found being alone isn’t always an unendurable situation. Yet I was not able to convey this message through my slideshows, proving it’s not enough with simple sounds and limited amount of still image. There are many more signs to add for my video to be understandable. As the reviewing of my class said, “A layer of me, my context and content is needed.”

Thanks for reading.

Junyuan Loo

Say hi to my site

Month: February 2016

Point of Views

Say My Name….

Singapore Diaries

Hopefully there’s still elements of surprise left…

WALKING HOME