Creative Industry Report: Jimmy Liao

几米is a Taiwanese illustrator who illustrates children’s books. He started off in the advertising industry as a graphic designer/art director. In his book “when the story was young” he talks about his experiences with leukemia and the reasons why he started writing children’s books. He started late at the age of 40 and it was only after he had recovered from being bed ridden with leukemia that he started publishing his works. He also talks about his line of thoughts and his inspirations for his works in this book. I would be choosing two of his works to talk about today, but I really recommend checking out his other works as well since this just the tip of the iceberg. ( The pictures of the books I’m showing would be in Chinese since it comes from my own collection, but he does have them in English as well.)
The Moon Forgets is one of the iconic works in his career as an illustrator, it is written with the intention of providing company and comfort to those who are feeling lonely. It talks about a boy’s journey with the real moon that has lost it’s memories. Each person interprets the book differently and the text differently. It holds different meanings for different people. Also, you really cannot just look at the words or just the pictures, they each have their own respective meanings and combines to become another.
This book is “for the children who grew up bravely.” His initial thought for this story was that he wanted to write a happy story for the moon because a friend pointed out that he kept writing about loneliness and sadness. Two experiences made him decide to make the theme more complicated. First is his past colleague from the advertising company had committed suicide, leaving his wife and child and the second is a friend who passed suddenly, similarly leaving his loved ones behind. He realised that he did not know how to comfort a child that has just lost his father thus including similar themes in the book, hoping to ease the pain of lonely children. He incorporated many themes in this book, single parents, daily life, a child’s short attention span and the story became an even sadder story.
How to Own a Corner is one of the first books I owned of his, I’ve heard of his books from my mom before, but never really touched them until I got into secondary school. Another good thing about his books is that adults can enjoy them as well. It is about a child that hides in the corner of the world when she feels like she is not being understood and feels lonely and she goes on an adventure in that small corner of the world. This book has phrases that I resonate with sometimes, realising that there’s always things that people would just not understand. Similar to The Moon Forgets, this is a story that everyone would have a different interpretation to it. It’s always fun to see different opinions on a book. The description at the back of the book says that I have a child in my heart that hides in the corner when she feels left out, there are puzzles for her to solve there and memories for her to fixate. Everytime she does that only for a little while, as she needs a bit of time to find her place in the world again.
What I really like about his illustrations is that at each stage of my life when I read his books there Seems to always be a new level of meaning that I would have missed out when I was younger. There are so many works of his that I have not read, but the ones I’ve read I have resonated and felt for. It is something that I strive to achieve, as in works that people can resonate with and understand.

Heritage Lightup

Honestly, my first impressions of the light up was …… it’s so red. It almost makes the whiteness of the buildings unnoticeable, maybe that’s that the reason why they chose predominantly white buildings for the project. Most of the buildings were just lit up with red lights and white light maybe for a patriotic reason since this event was to commemorate national day. I actually walk through most of the venues since they were only a short distance away from one another. The exhibitions were pretty similar but the audience was really greeted with an obnoxious shade of red that was for some part uncomfortable to see. In fact, most memorable thing on this trip for me was walking past the volunteers’ tent at the National Museum and getting jump scared at their shout when they won at a game of mahjong or whatever they were playing.  It might have been a good idea though to bring a picnic mat to the National Gallery to sit there and just watch the screen with the scrolling paintings. Overall it seems to be a patriotic message.

It would have been good if there were different meanings of history and cultural aspects to the works that stir up nostalgia for the audience though.

Reading Reflection

Relational architecture seems to be a re-contextualizing of certain architecture to give a different narrative from the original and breaking down on the materialization and environment of the buildings to give a different level of meaning to them. By adding different hyperlinks to the areas of a certain architecture Rafael Lozano-Hemmer deconstructs the given meaning of the architecture giving it new meaning and connections. The interesting thing is that people tend to react differently to changes perhaps due to culture differences no matter how similar you try to do it. On the other hand this might be the doing of certain groups of individuals who are enjoying the piece of work. people tend to follow what they see other people doing, so perhaps some of the people in Lisbon started trying to not overlap their shadows with others therefore starting to make people think they weren’t supposed to overlap there shadow or something. The British on the other hand is famous for their drinking culture and sarcasm thus it doesn’t seem to be too far from their culture to have that reaction to the works. It’s good though that the works often revitalizes the neighborhoods that were once quiet. There are things we could do with architecture to reconnect and reintroduce people to each other.

Reading reflection 2

From what I understand from the introduction of what Bachelard does, he is trying to relate philosophy to science. He is actually considering the science from a philosophical standpoint and considering their implications. Sciences on a whole is still subjective as much as people like it to be objective. People only do experiments that they want to know and if value is not seen in it then there is no point in experimenting in it. However the opposite is also true where there are a number of scientific research papers that are just obsolete since the research is done yet no one uses then. He seems to emphasis on the poetic image which has no time and is spontaneous, a concept which i don’t quite understand, due to the fact that to me images are a result of a person’s experience and whatever thoughts or images we feel right now is a result of time and the result of our cognitive abilities.

Reading Reflection 1

The main idea of this chapter seems to be talking about how the human body is a factor that defines “some spatial division and values”. The notion  that taller buildings command prestige,  why certain ways that people arrange spaces to show superiority. Why is it that people see the sky as more superior? The up direction is labeled as the future but how much of the perception of this is due to the ease of access to the attainable and the lack of knowledge of the unattainable? In scientific terms, space is defined in 3 dimensions.  1 dimension is a dot, 2 is a line, 3 is a space and time is the 4th dimension.  But yet this article is seeing space from another perspective which is according to human perception of space instead of scientific definitions. closeness between friends results in emotional intimacy and being further reduces that emotional warmth.