Never Thought I Could Do That

A photography project looking at areas that we have never done. I chose oysters as my topic because although I dislike raw food but people always mentioned how good oysters are, so I set myself a challenge to 'try' and taste oyster. And through photographs I conveyed the idea of the repulsion that I always get when thinking about raw food especially having already tried oysters, it made me feel nauseous even thinking about it.

I showed this through a series of photographs, using a glass as a symbolism of my stomach, I created an atmosphere from a 'clean' stomach to a 'filthy' and 'stained' stomach.

Scoliosis

A one week self-initiated project about scoliosis. For those who do not know what scoliosis is: it is an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine.

A series of photographs taken to make people understand how it feels like to have scoliosis - a condition I was diagnosed with 5 years ago. In order to illustrate the discomfort I experience, I had individuals imitate a crooked standing position consistent with the shape of my spine, and then try to hold that particular pose for an extended period of time. This illustrates the amount of discomfort scoliosis inflicted individuals have to put up with everyday, due to their internal spines being crooked.

The display is purposely done in an angle and descending in order to make the audience experience the discomfort.

During the experiment and testing stage, videos are taken in order to capture the individuals facial expressions and movement. (which I will be putting up soon when I finish editing them)

Whitechapel Photo

Mini Blackouts

Blinking is just as important as breathing. It is considered that every time we blink, a 'mini blackouts' is formed. Although this mini blackouts does not interupt our views of the world but if it adds up, we loss quite a lot of information in a day, month and year.

Experimentation 1:

3 blinking calendars were made based on a flipbook format. 30 or 31 (days in a month) alternating black and white papers were compiled to produce a calendar. The total minutes lost in that calendar month were revealed as the calendar is flipped from back to front.

Experimentation 2:

Using one part of a famous speech - Martin Luther King, "I Have A Dream", the loss of information through blinking were illustrated by crossing out words when reading the speech.

An audio was produced from Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. Every two seconds of the speech, 0.3 seconds of the audio is erased (the blink) - to demonstrate the idea of an information loss.

The visual impact of blinking is translated into hearing to stress the image imperfection.

In addition, a video is produced to highlight the visual and auditory concept.

Layouts

I've been practising some layouting spreads in InDesign. Playing around with the grids and texts. To be able to present the correct fonts for different type of spreads is quite difficult. Instead of making 2 double spreads that has a theme going on, I got carried away and made different theme for each spreads.

The first spread, is an advertisement spread for an individual company 'wongfuproduction' that is based in USA - promoting their event. The second spread, has an actual information of The Yas Hotel in Dubai, a spread aimed for the type of magazine such as travel guide. The third spread is based on a spread that can be found inside a collection of photographer's book.

The fourth spread is designed for Shinichi Maruyama (Artist) book cover where the images were taken from his own photographs.

Everyday Object: Secondhand Books

Each pairs were given one everyday object to work with; Secondhand Books. From it, we had to re-contextualise the object and turn it into something new.

Secondhand books are considered as unwanted yet reusable objects which fits with the concept of recycling. Since books are made of papers and papers are from woods, unwanted secondhand books should therefore return to their original roots - Trees. To grow back a book in a tree illustrates the re-contextualisation of an Everyday object.

Turn Off The Light, For A Starry Night

A week collaborative work with my friends, Sophie, Olivia and Marisa. We had to come up with a manifesto for a cause. After doing some research, we realised that light pollution in the UK is one of the severe problems which we have to be aware of. A thorough research was performed to see which city in the UK is worst impacted - London.

The light pollution has created red coloured sky thus less stars are seen at night.

Our manifesto is to encourage people to turn off the lights and bring back all the stars.

The statement of "Turn off the lights, for a starry night" was written in constellation style above our studio ceiling.

We used glow in the dark spray paint to write out our manifesto and covered the entire ceiling with small glow in the dark dots to imitate stars - thus when you look up the ceiling in the dark, it feels like you are looking at a sky full of stars; the excitement of seeing that many stars would make one understand our aim.

Click to view the image larger.

01.12.2011

An annual First Year project - World Aids Day. Within a week, 9 of us came up with a message that could make people aware and donate during the day (wandering in London for a day).

'Buy ribbons save lives' - every ribbons save one lives is our main message.

Our entertainment was demonstrated through our hand-made giant ribbons and interactions with people were created when ribbons were taken off the boards. They were then tied together to create a chain to show the number of people who has donated. This created enormous attention during the day and a total of £670 was raised from our group.

Process of making

A short documentation is made to record the day.

A blog is also created after the day so that people who had donated could track where their money has gone to and view our whole project.

Type!

"A formal manipulator in Mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence" - Howard Eves

Portraits

4 sets of different personality shadows are created to symbolise my portraits; funny, brave, quiet/shy and shaped by environment. One may not understand who the photos are trying to portray but a revelation of the character is shown at the end of the sequence.

This was done in two sunny days wandering around Kingston. I could still remember the embarrassment that I felt when taking these pictures. Most of these pictures were taken in a fast pace to avoid any passerby. Something quite hilarious yet embarrassing.

Universal Principle of Design

A 4-day layout exercise, initially I was working with my friend Junko and we were given a list of houses for our primary research. During the research and experimentation, we have explored in many directions in terms of type, object and image.

We created typography from cutting and sticking traced floor plans. The typography that we created for Mansion was the most successful ones - when we overlap the type together, an image of richterscale was illustrated which linked quite beautifully to the idea of Mansion being old.

I used the idea of maze to represent a Mansion. The size and the huge amount of walls in a mansion can be a challenge to get from one room to another. Click on the image to enlarge.

From one portrait's expression I demonstrated the claustrophobia feeling that one may experience in a small house.

Seeing and Reading

This is a project that I did earlier in the year and wasn't that pleased with it, since I didn't get to experiment much on the typography area. So I've decided to rework it and finally got around with it. This is the previous poster that I handed in - I used one of Rachel Whiteread's pattern work as a template for the poster. It was very simple, at that point I wanted to express the idea that most of Rachel Whiteread's work are about sculpture and through the repetition of pattern, somehow a 3D image is created.

This is an improvement of the poster. I played around more with the idea of legibility, but at the same time consider the visual aspect. To do this, I considered the title "I am not here" being invisible thus I decided to experiment with the idea of erasing some parts of the letters and consider at which point it will still be legible as a letter. Also 'overlaying' all texts onto the background gave another layer to the poster - making the bookshelf seemed to be popping out and the texts acts as a wallpaper.

More Development... (Final)

Typography has never been my strongest area. When it comes to inventing a new kind of type, I had to do more experimentation than usual.

By cropping off some parts of a letter - making it just enough to notice what letter it is, the notion of seeing and reading simultaneously is confronted - to which extent it is still readable as letters. The idea of positive and negative space is used to closely relate to the meaning of the title 'I am not here'

Colour Photography

This is one of the Photography project that we've done - the brief was to take colour photography, not considering the form/object, simply just the colour.

This was done in one day, walking around Kingston Town Centre - spotting colours. I had really fun taking these photos; considering I was quite worried about capturing simply colours in the beginning but as I wandered around, I spotted quite a lot - even in a very odd place like the light from the shops reflected to the metal bench. This project has made me more aware of really open my eyes and paying attention to all the things around me at the same time, looking at the environment in 360 degrees.