this photograph is one in a photograph set called <Mother Michael Goes to Heaven> by photographer Lilla Szasz. It’s about the story of a 3-persons home who are prostitute pimp and fetish separately. But in February 24, 2010, Michael killed himself and this family in slum of Budapest was broken ahead of time, leaving each other. But their lives were all recorded by her, Lilla Szasz. She is a kind of documentary photographer, who is always focusing on immigration, identity, gender issues and the living situation of the people lived at the bottom of the society. She always likes shooting people in misery, but still try to show the hope of life at the same time.

The photograph is from <The Honeymoon> taken by a young photographer called Juno Calypso. This image was taken when juno went to her own honeymoon, a honeymoon hotel in Pennsylvania. She described this picture as ‘This picture is why we look ugly. We look at the mirror, but we see the gargoyle. We saw a monster. We spend a lot of time in the bathroom to wash away dirt and shave hair, just to clean up this fear.’ And I think most of the work in this photo album is to show audiences an ugly side – the mainstream aesthetic view held by the world. Too many people take selfie to show their fake life just like an actor. But juno tried to take this series of photographs to remind us.

This is one of the photographs about the love between couples taken by Lara Gasparotto. She served as a photographer for some magazines in Brussels, capital of Belgium. She also likes recording her life in the way of taking pictures of her friends. But the image I chose is a photograph about the moment when the lovers are surrounded by love. Her photos would not be too clear and textured, and she wanted to make the picture have a feeling of untouched. Only the story in that photograph was the main purpose of her work.

These three are all my recent favorite photographers with some elements of documentary photography.

1, Live in the world of the senses and grow unscrupulously，Mp.weixin.qq.com，https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA3MDc5NTk0Nw==&mid=2247496674&idx=1&sn=bc04fca7a968ccd804ff1079781a7e7a&chksm=9f35e426a8426d3080f7aee7c525e8dd7f1e04adad0a3fdeca05bcf72b76b94492bfef466d18&scene=38#wechat_redirect

2, Lilla Szász: Mother Michael Goes to Heaven, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_46PpUfLGTk

3, Nell Frizzell, ‘I sounded like I was having the best sex’: Juno Calypso’s one-woman world tour of honeymoon hotels, the Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/02/juno-calypso-tour-honeymoon-hotels

Liu Xinyi

This is the poster of one of my favorite movies, chung king express, which has a really obvious style of postmodernism. The reason why I defined it to a postmodernism movie is mainly three, the first is that the movie has no definite theme, which means the audience can understand its meaning by themselves, in the other word, different audience can have totally different understanding after watching. The second one is that it distorts time. One of the most famous words in the movie is: ‘the closest distance between her and me is only 0.01 centimeters, and after 57 hours, I fell in love with the woman. But she was in love with another man after 6 hours.’ These are all damage to the continuity of time, which made the continuity of time is no more important, instead of it, the collage of each moments became the focus. The third reason is that movie can lead us to imagine a new city which doesn’t exist. The city in the movie isn’t the same one in real life, which is also the result of collage and reengineering. It is consistent with the repetition and no-source from Postmodernism. Everything is for audiences to think alone.

The photograph taken here is from the chanel fashion show 2014 fall/winter, this show is so unique from others, because Chanel decorated the show as a big supermarket, and all the goods in the supermarket were printed with the logo of brand. And all the models who should do catwalk all pretended to shopping in that supermarket. This innovative design connects high fashion and life. It effectively changed our ideas about that fashion is far away from normal life. Because the supermarket was really allowed to visit after the show, which caused that the authors, the audience, the curators, and the environment were all participants in that art work.

This is the photograph in the movie Truman show, which is about Truman finally decided to leave the ridiculous city he lived, which was a lie, his life was a show to everyone, in the other word, everyone in that town knew who he is instead of himself. Some comments about the film are mainly to criticize the unscrupulous modern media nowadays, and some others think that this movie has a deeper philosophy meaning: “Existence” is a fraud, “self” is a fraud, the world around you is carefully planned, and you are the pet. The environment around is objective existence but is an unsympathetic scam.

Liu Xinyi

http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-filmtv-48278-1.shtml, postmodernism in movie, 2003/3/5

https://baike.baidu.com/item/后现代主义/99666?fr=aladdin, postmodernism

https://www.weibo.com/bagszhuyejunlt?refer_flag=1001030102_&is_all=1&is_search=1&key_word=chanel超市#_0, chanel fashion show fall/winter 2014, 2014/3/5

https://image.baidu.com/search/index?tn=baiduimage&ipn=r&ct=201326592&cl=2&fm=detail&lm=-1&st=-1&sf=2&fmq=&fm=detail&pv=&ic=0&nc=1&z=&se=&showtab=0&fb=0&width=&height=&face=0&istype=2&ie=utf-8&word=楚门的世界, truman show

https://www.weibo.com/bagszhuyejunlt?refer_flag=1001030102_&is_all=1&is_search=1&key_word=chanel超市#_0, chanel fashion show fall/winter 2014, 2014/3/5

https://www.weibo.com/u/5245303645?refer_flag=1001030102_&is_search=1&key_word=王家卫&is_all=1#_0, wang kar wai

Till now, I have already finished three of my project which are graphic design, photography and motion design. I have to say that I learned a lot knowledge and skills during the past two months.

In graphic design, I’ve tried to do some creative design about English words, make some black-and-white posters by collage, then make them online with InDesign. I learned some information about typography and its history, and how to make a poster。 And hte process of making poster makes me learn how to put my own ideas into the posters, by putting the most important information which you want the audiences see first in the most prominent place. Moreover, I learned some basic skills about Photoshop, illustrator and InDesign. And I finished my first crit about those posters we made, this kind of crits every two week practiced our ability to show and explain our ideas to the audience. Since English is not my mother tongue, this is extremely useful for me to talk in front of people.

My second project is photography, which I’m interested in the most, I always preferred to use film camera to shoot in the past, so this is the first time I used a digital camera to photograph different objects. I also learned how to use lights to produce the light and shadow better and use the background of the scene to shoot a professional photo. What’s more, my impression about photography was that photography is an effective way to record life and reveal our inner thoughts. But after studying, I understand that it is also important to show the deep meaning behind each picture. And after all those objects we had to shoot, I found out I prefer the shooting of human portrait or their daily moment. Till now, photography is still my favorite part of studying, I might choose that as my second year project. In addiction, I did better and more fluently at my second crit than the first time.

My third project is motion graphic which I just finished last week, it is bit different from the other two because I never tried stuffs like that, making a simple animation. We use illustrator to play with two letters we picked in the beginning, stretch them and change the color, I used bright colors to make it more strongly visual. After this step, we set rhythm in another software, and add the sound to them. I have to admit that I was bit confused during that process, but the final work is better than what I expected.

This course has helped me improve the skill I already had, and has taught me new skills and knowledge which will help me in the future. But the ideas I’ve learned about art and design is more important. In general, the first lecture of each project was always about some basic theory, then we had to practice them to make sure we really get them, the fact is that both of them are really helpful and meaningful. I’ve enjoyed what I learned of graphic arts so far.

Liu Xinyi

It says that technology us the mortal enemy of art. Sometimes it makes sense, the reason is that the developing technology makes everything easier and more convenient, so that people are no longer willing to spend too much time for the artwork. But the completion of artwork is not about how simple it can be made, which is exactly the difference of it and the normal goods. A good artwork needs more time and deeply thinking. For example, ancient Chinese architecture were built with a special structure which is called Mortise and tenon structure, which is a type of joint that connects two pieces of wood or other material without any nails, it has not only the nice appearance, but also excellent load-bearing capacity. But it takes really long while to make, gradually, people also built houses in the ordinary way without that unique style.

But we have to admit that the development of science and technology is a great impetus to the development of the art, because the development of technology means that we can create some works of art that we had ideas about it, which the technology was not allowed. Take motion graphic as an example, the electronic technology was not that developed in the past, the previous artists had to make every scene by hand, then manually make it move up, in comparison, nowadays, we can operate directly on the computer animation software, this is a very big step of art area because of the improvement of technology.

The best way is making a balance between using latest technology to make better art work and keeping using original way with passion.

Liu Xinyi

In the upper picture, such a group of dense buildings were the Kowloon Walled City. It was built from 1949, and dismantled in 1993. More than 50000 inhabitants lived there, but the area of that is only 0.026 square kilometers, we can tell that the density of the walled city was 1 million 900 thousand people per square kilometer, there was the most densely populated area in the world especially during 60-70s.

Moreover, there were numerous criminals, drug traffickers, hungers, unlicensed dentists and prostitutes living in the Kowloon Walled City. They could be neighbors of any other common people, which brought not only high crime to this place, but also a kind of mysterious charm. People nowadays call it as legendary slum. Such a slum already provided loads of important inspiration to a large number of artworks, especially some science fiction of cyberpunk. Personally, I prefer this kind of dirty and marginal-culture place than those prosperous place. The reason is I prefer stories from more real people.

One of my favorite comments about it is: Kowloon Walled City is a place where the story never lacked.

This picture is about two gay boys in a club, which is 54 studio- the first club that allows both gays and heterosexuals to enter at the same time.

With the disco age coming in America, teenagers started to go to clubs to release their stress and unhappiness. And studio 54 was the most popular one in New York in 70s, all celebrities such as david bowie, Michael Jackson, Andy Warhol, Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, etc, came there to drink and dance for the whole night. But not only the celebrities, normal people can also come into studio 54 to enjoy their nights. There’s no class distinction or rules there, there was no age limit, no sex and sexual orientation restrictions. This is exactly what I love studio 54 the most, you can just be yourself and enjoy yourself in a relatively equal and free environment.

Its founder Steve Tyler once said: ‘A Good party is with people who are even more interesting than you.’ I would do anything if I have the chance to go back to that era and go to studio 54 even for one night.

Bibliography:

1, City of Darkness – Life in Kowloon Walled City 1993, Ian Lambot and Greg Girard, Watermark Publications (UK) Ltd, October 1993

2, lost memory, http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/?lang=cn#chapter=intro

3, Disco and legend Club steeped in drugs. The fall of fame and fortune in New York at the end of the 70s, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/mp/getmasssendmsg?__biz=MzA3MDc5NTk0Nw==&uin=MTM4MzcyOTMyNg%3D%3D&key=7abe095b989640fcad8e0dc32e64400054a3a55d3ec7a6c5fe4e90291ecbf7336372647409df736d72f6d22362229c747d5f7ffe7422b37d4c65b30feca9dc161942fde83d88b78e2e72b0d81b959da0&devicetype=iMac+MacBookPro14%2C1+OSX+OSX+10.12.6+build(16G29)&version=12030010&lang=zh_CN&nettype=WIFI&ascene=0&fontScale=100&pass_ticket=tg%2BBXpc%2FXQQo%2F0aEx6aQW8YJxm9WinV1jREvZrcFatHDutiWgO6k6di5csacK7lc#wechat_webview_type=1, Prozac, 2017/2/8

Liu Xinyi

In Wikipedia, authenticity is concerned as the truthfulness of origins, attributes, commitments, sincerity, devotion, and intentions. But I don’t totally approve this explanation, the reason is in my opinion, there is nothing which is 100 percent true. In one side, everyone might have their own different ideas and feeling to one thing, in the other side, a lot of things themselves are double-sided, you can not give it a specific definition. Take my favorite Chinese photographer Ren Hang as an example, he killed himself because of depression but I think he was best at using the film camera to shoot the human body. He stands out for queer and female through his photography and poetry works. But the truth is there are only a few Chinese appreciated his work, because some Chinese people’s understanding of sex and the human body still remains in a very traditional stage. This is why all the record and revaluation about him and his career can not be defined as authenticity. And it’s impossible for anything to be truly authentic.

Moving to the principles of modernism and contemporary practice, I do think that principles of modernism hold value in contemporary practice. Modernism means the movement of art and design. And those principles are the experience of old artists, it is certainly helpful for us to practice contemporarily, but what we need to do is using it as a reference, then adding our own ideas to create something new.

Liu Xinyi

Bibliography

1, Authenticity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity, 29/10/17

2, The Core Principles of Modernism (overview),

https://charlotteroe.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/the-core-principles-of-modernism-overview/, 29/10/17

it’s an old picture, to be honest, I was totally shocked when I first saw this picture, exactly in front of the Tiananmen in china, in front of the photo of Mao Ze Dong, who was the first chairman of new china, in front of two soldiers and some people, there are two girls kissing each other. There’s nobody stand out to say something or do something, they just stand there and talk, but I can see the confusion, incomprehension and slightly contempt through their eyes. And the warm tones and majorly red background brought this photograph stronger Chinese old-fashioned style. Unfortunately, it’s still mostly the same as the situation of queer in china nowadays. no one will abuse them or even argue with them in real life because they all know there’s nothing wrong with it whether legally or morally, but gesticulating, groundless talk never stopped. the same with transgender people and gender identity disorders, they’re even in a worse place. Basically, a man is not supposed to use makeup in mainstream society in China.

Planning torock is one of my favorite British musicians. She changed her first name into a masculine “Jam” to try to escape from the define the popularity of women. We can easily connect her face, or we can say the face she made with the sculpture in Italy’s classic period. Unkempt, short hair, unbelievably towering nose, sharp eyes and even the twilight of the fangs. Her nose prosthesis is the so-called “female sexuality” satire. And the purple background makes this photograph more mysterious. And she emphasizes the concept of “flowing gender”, just like the spectrum. This is why Jam keep standing out for feminism and lgbtaq.

Liu Xinyi

Today, I watched a film called terminal bar, it talks about the stories happened in a bar in New York City from 1972 to 1982. The film is not dynamic as usual, but is made up by numerous black-and-white film photographs. The fact is that I’m a big fan of film cameras, in my mind, film photographs are the best tool to record one’s memory. The black-and-white background makes everything much more period-style.

The movie mentions that some consumers in terminal bar are black men, and some of them are gay men, who are usually not the ‘big guys’ in history, the photographer used the camera to record their lives, memory and the other kind of history of a city in a extremely documentary style. For me, I’m not into those magnificent, splendid scenes, on the contrary, I prefer things or stories about subculture, especially the subculture of teenagers.

What impressed me the most was that in that loads of pictures, few people deliberately look to the lens, more pictures are about the real expressions and actions, and as I mentioned, this realistic feeling is the most attractive thing for me.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are a lot of character facial features in terminal bar, and the distinct stories behind those different face. With a great interest in realistic photography, I wanted to make a series of work like this as well.

Liu Xinyi