A sky or a river? A reflection of each other? It depends on how you view it.
The two pictures are derived from the same digital drawing.
In his Third Critique (The Critique of Judgment), Immanuel Kant states that:
In painting, in sculpture, indeed in all the visual arts, including architecture and horticulture insofar as they are fine arts, design is what is essential… The colors that illuminate the outline belong to charm. Though they can indeed make the object itself vivid to sense, they cannot make it beautiful and worthy of being beheld.
This project is to prove against such a claim, using color as the major medium. By only changing the blend modes in RGB and CMYK color spaces after creating the digital layers, the different colors and the opposite directions of portrayal guide viewers’ visual interpretation in distinct directions to see a glowing sunset or a flowing river. The colors also give different meanings to the white wavy lines highlighted. Are they wings of birds, or waves of water? There is a lot to reflect from colors.
Using Illustrator to simulate the pattern of burned and torn paper (burning and tearing as attempts of destroying an item) and physically manifest it through laser cutting on a distinct medium of acrylic sheet or wood board, the project plays with the art of destruction. Putting those manifestations of destruction together, the pieces were able to form a beautiful natural landscape of mountains and waters without advance planning. A new life arises from destruction.
Concentrate and hold a question in mind, and open the book on a random page. A fated instruction or advice appears. This will be the answer to your question. This is usually how the book of answers instructs its users. This, is also a book of answers. However, in place of the generally instructive sentences, lyrics from a selection of my favorite songs, whether or not they make sense as an advice, were extracted from their original context and compiled together into The Book of “Answers”.
Yet still:
Concentrate and hold a question in mind, and open the book on a random page. Reflect. This will be the answer to your question.
Of course, many of you will not follow the rules to the book of answers. The curious ones might at one point abandon the excitement of discovering each random discrete page, and wish to read through all the tricks it has in store, scanning through all the pages from start to end. This Book of “Answers" is also prepared for that.Read through the book, it is no longer a book of answers, but a puzzle of linked or disconnected narratives and dialogues, depending on how you read it.
This project is about the breakdown and reorganization of memory through a variety of mediums: colors, patterns, texts, artificially created light, and natural light. On a timeline which is represented by a line of traveling light artificially painted, I extracted sections from and placed, in time order, photos taken of texts that I found interesting in a specific moment from the past, across an “emotional landscape” in the background created by color gradient and strokes. Those pieces of photos not only include text extracted from their original context, but also factors of the environment and surroundings such as the light conditions when the picture was taken. Through cropping, transformation, and alternation of layer blend modes, all of those visual representations of multifactors from the past are “merged” into this continuous landscape. The memories are broken down and reorganized.
The second layer of breakdown and re-collection happens when postcard-size sections are cropped from this large landscape and physically collaged together in a new order. One could observe that the words from different texts come together within one postcard frame to generate a new meaning and connect to other postcards in a new logic; the color gradient is also reorganized to guide a new interpretation.
This project is a physical manifestation of memory. To remember is to re-collect, rethink, and reinterpret. As one of the texts “re-collected” in this project says, “ the psychologist Barry Schwartz has noted that, “recollection of the past is an active, constructive process, not a simple matter of retrieving information. To remember is to place a part of the past in the service of conceptions and needs of the present.”