GDAD final show

Today we had the opportunity to visited the GDAD student’s final show. There are a lot of impressed works for me. I have learned a lot new knowledge through these wonderful work. I would like to introduce one of them to describe.
“Universe” is a installation art work made by Puyu Dong. He used wooden frame, wooden board, nails, threads, barbed nets and tree trunk pieces to make a “Loom”(textile machine) to describe his own understanding or thinking of the universe. In the human history, people had different understanding for the universe in every defining moment. Even nowadays, we are not sure that our knowledge must be right. So he try to use this kind of “machine” to try to express human’s exploration of the universe and create several philosophical thinking for universe and life. Although the form was a little simple, probably because the time was not enough, in my opinion, his research process is very interesting. I also have researched similar concept before about life. Hope we can have the opportunity to discuss this topic.

Tate Modern Museum

On our last school trip, we visited the Tate Modern Museum in London. It was not very strange for Chinese students due to the famous Chinese “artist” Ai Weiwei has displayed a famous art work there. He putted a lot of sunflower seeds on the whole ground in that exhibition. However, there are also a huge number of other great art works such as the three “most influential artists” in 20th century---Picasso, Matisse and Dali.

That must be a precious chance for me to see these masters work in close way. Previously, I only saw them in books. Among them, Matisse is my favorite artist. He was the representative of the fauvism. His works had the feminine of impressionism and the rigorous of the cubism. In the later period of his career, he has used paper cut as the form of his works. He said that the paper cut is just like use the scissors to make a sculpture on the paper. Those kind of work including a lot of east philosophy consciousness. I also want to use paper cut as a main carrier of my future works, his works and concept has a deep reflection for me.

some ideas after watching the "Maker"

“Maker” is a movie which introduced several great contemporary designers. It shows a lot of brilliant ideas. All of these ideas have a deep relationship for our society,  they really opened my eyes. However, what impressed me most was a saying in this movie. A designer said: someone may think the my “art idea” is not useful for people’s daily life. But if you said art was created for someone. Every art might be useless.

I really agree with this opinion. To be honest I have been asked such question like “who did you design for?” when I was interviewed by some “famous” university. I really wonder that this kind of “concept” still exist today. Previously, artists had no choice due to they must create for the “noble”, “church” or “royal family”. A good example in the art history is Caravaggio’s two “Saint Matthew” oil painting. He must change the Saint Matthew more “beautiful” due to the church’s requirement, although the first one was much more vividly. So if we have still said art is used to service for others, it might be a little bit strange.

Project 3

Our group's name is called"J&C", which means our majors are Jewellery and Ceramics. We come from different countries including Taiwan, Thailand, Japan and China. I am so proud of our teammates that everyone worked so hard. We all known we got the responsibility for the team. We often took a long time meet after class although everybody was tired, no one complained. In this process, we have learned how to be strong and brave.

During this project, I got the responsibility to do the research for our project. The topic is "identity", I got our inspiration from these two concepts below.

Firstly,“Identity”means people survey themselves, people want to know who I am. It’s a kind of self-inspect. Our object aims to find people’s “consciousness” in spirit level. The concept inspiration is from Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Image Theory.It is considered about the first time that people started to survey themselves as a infant is when they saw the mirror image of themselves. It’s the origin of human’s consciousness, called “mirror image stage”. (after that the Freud’s “Oedipus stage” was appeared).

Secondly, During the art history, there is a similar concept called “introspective art”. We adopted the inspiration of Modigliani, who is called the greatest Italian artist in 20th. Throughout his painting career the eyes in Modigliani’s portraits are “remarkable”, often he represents them as blank.People can use their eyes to see the whole world, but we can’t see ourselves totally (without a mirror). So the target that people in the painting wanted to survey is themselves, like the artist only talked to himself.

Through this project, the most important thing for me is that we have learned how to cooperate with others. We helped each other, learned a lot of things from my teammates. I really appreciate this experience.