Door gods or Menshen（门神） are divine guardians of doors and gates in Chinese folk religions, used to protect against evil influences or to encourage the entrance of positive ones.
Category
Expelling evil spirits
Blessings
Military officer
Civil official
The patterns often attract my attention when I pass by. It made me think that something supernatural is guarding the house.
Old Door Gods preserved in Chendejyu Shrine Museum , Tainan City, Taiwan
Moodboard 1
Inspired by Ai weiwei‘s Door gods posters, I want to add some current elements that are more relevant to our generation. Nowadays, there are many new ‘gods’ that we worship to, like Steve Jobs, Elon musk or Jack Ma.
Ai Weiwei, Menshen
Ai Weiwei and FAKE design office’s Door Guardians for 2011 (image from theepochtimes.com)
AI WEI WEI, Guardian Christmas screen saver artwork copyright: Ai Wei Wei
Culture keeper 2015, illustrated by Min Liu
Moodboard 2
Inspired by a Chinese illustration artist, Song Xiaqi, based in Shanghai. His illustration embraces the tradition and re-touches it with contemporary feelings.
I like how he uses thick strokes and the way he treated each graphical elements.
门神 by Song Xiaqi
门神 by Song Xiaqi
Moodboard 3
Another approach is go for abstraction. Since the banner is very long and narrow, abstract patterns will give a strong visual impact.
猴年吉祥 Good luck for the Year of Monkey, illustrated by DO ON東
Panel testing
Based on Aiweiwei’s work, I created a rough styleframe to see if the elements work together on a long narrow panel.
ADM Library is specially designed to reflect the creative and artistic nature of its environment. It houses a growing collection of resources in the visual arts, architecture, drawing, design, illustration, painting and photography and a strong collection of AV materials. It contains a cinema room, individual A/V viewing carrels, a flexible seating spaces, printing area, writable black glass wall as well as book section.
Stairs to the cinema
Mainly ADM students visit ADM Library for reading books and magazines, doing assignments, relaxing and printing services.
Normally, most of students will sit at white table area. They can read or use their own laptops there. Seldom people really interact with others, rather doing their own work.
And I also noticed only few people would use A/V viewing carrels. Maybe the place is not comfortable, like a computer lab, compared to Hive’s library. However, people likes to sleep in the library also in the corner. Because library is a quiet and comfortable place, students like to spend whole day there.
Interestingly, there are a few of very large glasses and empty spaces which I could experiment with.
Developing Idea
Initial impression
ADM Library is well equipped with lots research resources and convenient for studying. Sometimes we focus on a project attentively without even knowing a few hours already has past, as if time in library is faster than outside. It inspired me to do a installation about time to let audience experience the idea of time change in library. the focus could be on faster time or timeless experience.
I did some research on history of timekeeping device. It is quite interesting that how ancient people used water and candle to calculate time. And timekeeping devices changed our world where all human activities refer to it.
My initial idea is to build several water timer devices, ranging from 15mins to 1 hour. People can grab any of them for testing and timing their study time.
Another idea struck me in the process is people like to sleeping in ADM Library. I wanted to draw attention on and amplify this issue. Mainly because students don’t get enough sleep or stress out from the school works. So plan A is to lay a few sleeping bags on the big empty area’s floor and put assignment papers or coffee cups and so forth around them. Plan B is to put a figure in only cloth form on a chair. In front of him is a laptop and all rubbishes he consumes.
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