Shelter Project Review

For the Shelter project review, I displayed my little sculpture of coffin made of cards and a noun finished illustration of a girl and a coffin.

I love to make my work very detailed so I quite enjoyed drawing the outline of the coffin, making a prefect trapezium and building up the form of the coffin, etc. I was extremely concentrated to make the coffin and worked on it without taking any breaks for 8 hours. I really like the outcome after I finished it. Finally, I used tissues and a few pieces of soft PVC to set up the coffin inside nicely and the sculpture completed with my little figure lying there.

I named the title of the sculpture, ‘R.I.P’. because everyone realised that is belong to the shelter project, they could easily understand the connotation of the coffin. However, if the coffin is shown to the other people, I have no idea of what the title should be. So there is a problem confusing me. If people have the concept of shelter in mind to look at the sculpture, the sculpture works. But if they don’t, it doesn’t work.

Therefore, I tried to draw an illustration to express my concept. I supposed to finish it with a background of a destroyed city but I found difficult to draw that. It takes a long time and is impossible to be finished by the review.

Film Photography

This summer, I was so excited to receive the vintage camera, Nikon FE form my dad who brought it in a street where were so many camera stuff for sell in Hong Kong. I finished my first colour film in 10 years, developed and printed the photo at a photo shop in Hong Kong. However, the photos were so gray and lack of contrast. I was disappointed because of the result. And finally, the shutter of camera have even stopped when I tested the camera and tried to find out what was wrong with it at my England home.

I extremely wanted to use film camera to take pictures because I found bored to use digital cameras. It is so easy and convenient to use a digital camera. People can take as many photos as they want if they have large capacity memory cards. Even though the memory card is full, deleting unwanted images is easy. That makes people taking pictures without considering the situation, lighting and composition.

I really like the kind of photos photographers capture them after careful observing. I hope to improve my photographic through using film camera. I hope to be more sensitive to feel the little interesting things in my life and capture them with cameras. My aim is eventually I will use cameras in a same way, no matter film or digital.

I have won two cameras from ebay auctions. They are Canon T60 and Canon AE-1 Program.

The first roll of film was taken by Canon T60 with Kodak UltraMax 200. I heard from my dad people like to use Kodak films for Portraits because the tone of them is warn and it is pretty good to display human skins.

The second roll of film was Fuji Superia 200 taken by Canon AE-1 Program. The tone of Fuji film is colder than Kodak. Same as my dad, I love the colour of Fuji film more.

Both of the roll of film were developed and printed from Jessops. In film photography, the most important things those effect the finally result of images are films and lenses. Cameras are just like exposure boxes, most film cameras are so similar as long as they are with accurate light meters.

Coffins

“Coffins” is the new concept for the shelter project. At the first time when I received the project, my mind was full of zombies so I was thinking something about a shelter from zombies. And then I thought of death. Finally, the idea of coffins came to my mind.

Why do people need a shelter? Because they live with pain and misery and they need a shelter to escape from the world they are living in. At anytime and anywhere, so many people suicide to escape the reality, some people suffer miserable diseases and gifts from the god of death might be the best things for them.

A coffin is a very symbolic icon of death. It is sentimental to most of the people in the world. Different people from different places have different feeling of a coffin. When we think more, it is very philosophical.

So I am going to make a sculpture of a coffin. I tried and tested making coffins with papers. Not bad, I can make them with paper, I thought I couldn’t.

Liverpool Biennial 2010 - Touched

What is Liverpool Biennial 2010?

Liverpool Biennial is the largest as well as one of the most exciting contemporary visual arts events in the UK, and with 960,000 visits in 2008, it is one of the best attended in the world.

Liverpool Biennial presented Touched, the International 10 exhibition as part of Liverpool Biennial 2010

18 September - 28 November 2010

“In a world packed with countless biennials, triennials and the rest, this madcap event in Liverpool remains distinctive and entertaining. The shows are scattered all over the city, often in pretty strange places, but the overall ambition — to introduce British audiences to up-and-coming international artists and trends — is adhered to excellently." The Times

We had a school trip to visit this exciting arts event on 21/10 a lovely Thursday. This event is so awesome because the whole city becomes a massive gallery. We had to follow the landmarks of the map go to different places to see those artworks. We seemed playing a tracking game and it was so interesting. However, we could not have enough time to see all the exhibitions in a day so I plan to do to Liverpool again to see the rest of artworks we haven’t seen.

We had so much fun during this trip. Some of the artworks are pretty interactive and we could play with the artworks or play in the artworks.

I took a short video of Žilvinas Kempinas’s Lemniscate(2008) in the exhibition of City without Walls. The description of the installation is

Žilvinas Kempinas’s Lemniscate(2008) is a large-scale kinetic sculpture consisting of two massive industrial fans whose billowing force suspends a strip of magnetic tape in midair.

This artist has done quite many flying tape installations and they are easy to be found on Youtube.

Recreate

The training session of the Environmental Art Project was on last week Wednesday and Thursday. People who get involved with this project only needed to go to one of the days. And I went to the Wednesday one.

Including the coordinators Amy and Bob, there were only two persons joining the session on that day, who were Katie and me. As there were only a few people, we had more time to know each other. That was pretty good and I felt so comfortable to stay with them.

During the training session, Amy taught us how to manage some situation, we finished a form to find what kind of learning style we are, talked about our ideas and made a quick teaching plan and tried to present that.

Eventually, Katie is going to set up a facebook group called Recreate which means children will need to make artworks with junks. It sounds so interesting!

Free for Art Festival 2010

In this blog, I am going to talk about a couple of things about Free for Art Festival.

The Place and Setting Up

The exhibition was in Piccadilly Place where is near to the Piccadilly is near to the Piccadilly Rail station. This was my first time getting involved with an exhibition apart from school. It was a very good experience to be aware of the procedure of an exhibition. The place we used was an empty flat in the ground floor of the building. A few month ago, the first time I saw an exhibition set up at this kind of place, I was so surprised because I would never imagine the owner of an unused office in Hong Kong would let people do such things. However, if I will have an opportunity to manage an exhibition in Hong Kong, I will try to find some this kind of place.

My 3 images are digital prints in A3 size on plastic boards. They are not difficult to be set up so I chose to put them on the pose near the entrance.

Invigilating

My invigilating time was at 1:30-4:00pm on 3/10 Sunday. There must be at least 2 persons invigilating the exhibition when it is open. The person with me was Bex. She almost did all the introduction job of the festival when every viewer came. Therefore, I had time to take some photos for documentation because I accepted to document the event as a volunteer.

We needed to take down how many people came to the exhibition for record. And that day, I had got 38 viewers. Was it good?

Documenting with Photos

As I accepted to be a volunteer photographer for the event, I went to there on another day for some more photos. I brought 2 lenses which were a 17-40mm lens and a 70-200mm lens, a tripod and an external flash gun. About 300 photos have been taken, I hoped those photo will be useful for the next FFAF!

Summer Project

My wearable gallery is a belt of …what you see in the picture but I would call them Hong Kong people.

In fact, it is so normal when so many people are getting on an escalator at the same time. It supposes to be very crowded and disarray until I saw those people in the capital of Tai Wan, Taipei.

I was shocked when the first time I saw the Taipei people who were getting on the escalator in a queue very tidily. I went to Taipei for a five days trip with my friends. We arrived at Taipei airport at 3 o’clock morning so we had to stay there till 6 o’clock to get the first coach to get to the town. The first subway train we got on was about 7:30am. It was the peak time for the subway. So many people were getting trains to go to school or go to work but they were so disciplinal to get on the escalator. The left side of the escalator was for the people in hurries and the right side of the escalator is for the people not in hurries. The queue can be a straight line over 30 meters long at the right side even there were no one on the left side of the escalator. That was just so amazing.

My wearable gallery is to represent Hong Kong people’s behaviour or people’s behaviour in anywhere except the disciplinal Taipei people. We had born from sperms and we born to be sperms. That probably is very natural and right. But remember, we can change.

Specially thanks Sam to wear the belt.