4D: Controversial Artists

Pompompom- Kyary Pamyu Pamyu

For our last project, we are tasked to do a research on controversial video, song or performance art. I don’t know why but the first thought that came to my mind was a MV called Pompompom by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

This video mainly consists of nonsensical elements like broken arms and funky bright colours. I was one of the few people that witness the backlash it received when it first came out whereby people were saying that this video was a bad educational material for kids and should ban children from viewing it. However, it’s quite interesting that shortly after it was released, people actually start viewing this as an art and actually start liking it. Although it is out of the norm and quirky, I feel that to be able to incorporate a video with so many interesting elements and still create a strong constant dynamic is a great feat and admirable.

Drawing Restraint – Matthew Barney

DRAWING RESTRAINT (1987-present) is a significant and long-term project for Barney, in which he proposes art-making as parallel to athletic training: the development of form occurs through resistance. Begun while still a student at Yale, Barney was influenced by his background as an athlete and sought to foreground the physical body and its tensions in a studio practice.

http://www.ago.net/matthew-barney-drawing-restraint

One of the performance art that caught my eye from this series of Matthew Barney is Still. As shown above, Barney attempts to mark the ceiling and the walls while bouncing on a tilted trampoline or tethered at the thighs with bungee cords. He being an ex-athletic, tries to draw upon an athletic model of development in which growth occurs only through restraint. As a result, his muscle will encounter resistance, which becomes engorged and is broken down, and through healing becomes stronger. In my honest opinion, while I do understand his underlying concept to recreate an athletic’s body structure, however, I cannot fathom why he would want to recreate these performances through other mediums when he could go through the normal athletic routine to achieve similar results. Also, the whole series has been around for 3 decades which is I feel is a great feat to be able to hold on and continue performing.

Get Back- The Beatles

One controversial song is Get Back by The Beatles. The controversial with this song is that some said to be about getting back to your inner child and inner peace, whereas others believe that the tune is a covert attack on immigration in the United Kingdom. There are also some who say that this was meant for the xenophobic politicians and racists in England at that time. While I can’t comment much about the song as I do not have much knowledge about the situation and history then, I feel that this is an interesting example whereby a song can create such a huge commotion and discussion with different perspective and ideology.

[Response] Guo Xi’s Landscape Painting

Through this essay, we learn the way of looking and perceiving landscape paintings. He brings out the essence of landscape painting by guiding us on how we should view such paintings in terms of our mentality and eye movement, like if we view a painting with the heart of appreciating the nature, the artwork will be valuable to the beholder, otherwise, it will be hard to appreciate his works. Also, when viewing a painting, we should view from afar to take in the whole scenic environment depiction he has created. Through this, he wants the viewer to appreciate the mood and idea behind several elements he curated in his works.

Also, the essay highlights the individuality and persistence of Guo Xi which we can prominently when he lives in an era where calligraphy and poems are placed above paintings, but he persisted with what he wants ultimately and became a notable painter in the whole of China art history.

With this, I am deeply inspired by Guo Xi’s deep yet comprehensive ideology which can be seen from his more than meets the eye paintings. From mist that can represent deities or the unreachable to seasons that can relate to different moods, I can feel the profundity behind his concept and thinking and this is what I really looked up to.

4D II Project 2 – Soundscape

Artist Statement

EmOCEAN is a soundscape that reflects emotions through the use of an ocean landscape. It explores the happenings when emotions take over tranquillity. I made the audio to be under the night sky as the night always exudes a feeling of a mystery to uncover which fits my aim to let the audience uncover the emotions inside my soundscape. In the audio, different elements like thunderstorm, rain and waves were utilised to paint the landscape of an ocean. Also, windchime to represent tranquillity. Emotion is not felt based on just one element but many. Hence, this project gave me a good opportunity to uncover the abstrusity of feelings.

Research/ Concept

My original idea was to actually record an audio about a day of my life. However, I tried with some test shots and I felt that the audio was relatively mundane- there weren’t any layers and complexity to the audio. It felt mono. Furthermore, the idea was kinda cliche. My next idea was actually an inspiration from a song in my playlist which I was playing on my way home.

The introduction to the song was actually my most favourite part of the song whereby it plays the sound of waves and windchime. Hence, I decided to do an audio on an ocean/ sea landscape. However, during the consultation, I realised this was another cliche idea but I insisted on the ocean concept due to my obsession with the introduction of the song. So Lei suggested me to incorporate emotions to my original idea.

Yeap, that was the start of my misery. How in the world am I going to incorporate emotions to my audio? Like how? Do emotions have an audio to represent it? How do I even invoke such emotions in my audio? I decided to do some research on emotions through sound and below are some of my inspirations.

The audio in this clip made use of repetitive rhythms to evoke feelings and emotions which inspired my to use the sound of wind chimes throughout my soundscape.

Through this video, I decided to include some foley elements into my audio like rainfall which I created through the crushing of plastic and blowing into the mic and doing some post editing after that.

Making of Soundscape

The making of the soundscape was another challenge for me as I have no experience with audacity although we did some exercises in class before and having an extra clear recorder wasn’t helping much either as it tends to record other disruptive audios too. For the waves audio which I recorded, it was actually filled with many background noise like footsteps, the rustling of the leaves and people talking. Also, this problem arises in pretty much every audio of mine- the sound of the crickets and frog. After much struggling and playing around noise gate and noise reduction, I managed to tune down the background noise to the best I could and cover the redundant sounds by underlaying it with a constant base audio.

To ensure that the audio does not sound choppy with the many different sound elements that I incorporated, I translated a picture of waves into audio. I used this image as it has a sense of motion to it- an ambiguity towards whether it is a stagnant wave or a moving wave, hence, a neutral stand in terms of wave.

So after much talking, here’s the end product~

The dynamic in my soundscape is actually quite simple. First, we start off with equal audio from both the wind chime which I used to represent calm and neutralness, and the waves which paint my scene. The use of crickets here is to represent the night sky. As we proceed, we realised that the crickets started to disappear and there is a short moment of peace before it is replaced by a storm/ thunder which mimics strong emotions like anger and anxiousness or even anxiety that we are bound to feel at any part of our lives. My intentions with the raindrops which came after that was to evoke a sense of turmoil within the audience. The wind chime is still playing here as I intend to show that anger has taken over and our emotions are skewed now. In real life, we always hear frogs croaking after the rain stops, hence, I included that to show that it is not raining anymore. Lastly, I tune up the volume of the wind chime to illustrate the comparison between emotions before and after the rain.

Credits

Thunder

I was praying for thunder for the past week but it only rained and thundered really softly sigh so I had to get the thunder sound from an online source below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkG4Fd1Igg

Wind Chime

I walk the whole mall and they don’t sell wind chimes sigh. Henceforth, the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw_1PsJQP9Y

TATA.

Art History Proposal

Q4. Compare landscape painting by Guo Xi’s with woodblock print of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai. Consider the following in your discussion: patrons, producers, materials, production, function and meanings.

Claim

Both paintings are largely different in terms of purpose, medium used and painting styles.

Introduction (300 words)

Artist background
Summarise what I am going to talk about in my essay in terms of different factor

The assimilation of different art culture between different geographies has always been one of the difficulties faced by art historians and in fact, one of the absolute that most art historians have to go through during their studies. This is especially so when we analyse the art culture between ancient countries like China and Japan, where they are more than what meets the eye- they might be close in proximity and culture but contrary to common belief, they differ in an acute yet subtle way. The study of landscape paintings between China and Japan is crucial to art historians as they form the big pillar of ancient art in these countries and by analysing the two, we are able to dissect and gain an in-depth insight into the culture intertwine between the two. Talking about landscape paintings, we will inevitably think about the two greatest painters in the history of China and Japan, Guo Xi and Hokusai respectively.

Body ( 1000 words)

2 Similarities: Drawing style and context
3 Differences: Purpose, mediums and meaning

Conclusion (200 words)

Zine Presentation

义顺 / Yì shùn / Nee Soon / யீஷூன்

Yishun has a large population of up to 200000 people, comprising of many subdivisions within the town.

Yishun was part of territories inhabited by the indigenous nomadic boat-dwellers known as Orang Seletar – descendants of the orang laut or “sea people” who lived in boats and made a living as fishermen.

In January 2016, Yishun was designated as the first “dementia-friendly” town due to its large elderly population. Hence, in my final zine, I would like to show the transformation of Yishun from a kampong to what it is today.

To-do list:

Zine Research

ONE

This zine layout gives me a clear sense of how different principles of art is utlized within a zine and also it makes use of different art rules like the rule of third and hierarchy in the layout itself too. This zine also gives me a clear sense of what is expected from a zine and acts something like a guide for me.

TWO

The author made strong use of colours to give off an impactful message and grabs the readers attention within seconds. The coordination of colours within the pages tones down the biazarre0ly coloured images and seem harmonised in the viewer’a eyes.

THREE

The author made use of both illustrations and pictures in this zine which is what im going for in my zine. The author also arrange the different elements in such a way that although it might seem minimalistic, it is actually very congested with pictures and infomation.

FOUR

I like how the author made use of the pop art concept in her zine. We can see a uniform colour of pink her but the use of triad colours brightens up the whole zine, making it more funky and fun. The author also uses the true colour of images to highlight certain images.

FIVE

This is my personal favourite. I like how the words are placed in the photos and the utlisation of the world map to show the location. The designs are really simple but the overall touch still look classy and clean.