Symposium，Presentation

My work is to explore the stressful and fickle modern life and the suppression of emotion in the urban life. The way of expression is to make the ideas visible to the public, such as installation and interactive design in a space.

I’m interested in the urbanities’ suppressed and concealed emotion. It is acknowledged that in the contemporary society, everything are developed very fast, and there are a lot of pressures in the city life, such as people ‘s work, study and living statement. In the surface of their life, people have their own schedule for work or study, they face challenge, salve problem and make social contact. However, from the inside of heart, the stress makes them feel lonely, unhappy, discouraged or passive.

When I start the project, I tried to express the idea from the angel of person, but now my angel has been a little bit changed. I want to create an atmosphere in a specific space and to encourage viewers’ comments. That’s a kind of visual communication and participation.

There are some models, which I have already showed in the unit1. I tried different materials to create visual effects in a model of space. But the problem is the infeasibility. They are really hard to realize in a large real space.

So after that, I extended the ideas, to do an installation. Here the large-scale drawing could be realized by working with the fact that it is on a paper roll. I can invent people come to the inside and experience the effect. But the effect is not as powerful as which I want to have.

Through a lot of research about the installation and space work from related artists’ works, I tried to think the specific emotions of urban people. And I find all my ideas is my own thinking and feeling, not the attitude or thinking from the specific people who living in London around us. As a foreigner, I cannot understand British people’s thinking because of the different culture and society. So I did interviews and try to know the area specifically. And I want to know how people think about their life in a large city and what’s the different between china and here. Through the interviews, I got a lot of information from different people who working here or come from other countries. Most of them feel stressful, lonely, unhappy or busy to their work or study. And some people feel the pressure must be happened with the rapid development of society, but we need to face the stress and make our psychology to be better. I like the to do the interviews and will keep doing this. I will try to get more and more ideas by different specific questions.

This is a small video, I just test the visual effect to create a illusion or disorientation of an urban life, but here the problem is the drawing of the buildings are not suitable to express my idea, because it is not real city life.

So after that, I took photos around the city, and choose modern buildings as the element. Here I edit a small video and projected it to the colourful papers to create a fickle word. I am thinking about the way of expression, it could be a installation like the video showed, I can use strings to hang the tier upon tier of colour papers which like the tier upon tier of buildings in the city. Another way is to show the video on the each of the walls and floor in a real space. It is also a way to make a disorientation of the urban life.

Here I tested the effect by using the projector in the private area. I projected the image in the place which I am living. For urbanities, the home is close and private and make people relaxed, but I move the stressful situation to their private space to create the stressful and oppressive atmosphere.