third report to lee

prior to our second talk via skype, i was seeing all the ideas from the previous week fading in and out of viability, relatedness, and meaning. thanks to many projects in many art classes at grinnell, this phase scares me much less than it used to, and i welcome the shifting and impending rejection of the original idea(s). so i was happy to find myself possessing less interest in the koi imagery, and the idea of touch elevating to the same initial level i'd possessed during my first days in china.

 

but two things came to alter this thought process: one was your enthusiasm for the pond imagery, i believe for its connection between the embers of a cigarette and the vibrant scales of some koi. two, maggie said something quite interesting over a lunch of fish that, while it stops short at being the final piece in this problem,¹ promotes a more meaningful reason for the relationship: apparently, the color orange doesn't exist in china as a distinct entity from red (or yellow). that is, orange, according to the chinese, is but an extension of its primary neighbor; despite the firewall here, i was able to find some information to back up this off-handed comment, and it seems as though she's right: most chinese may not know the character for "orange," instead favoring "red" or "reddish-yellow" in part because orange pigments were not common in feudal china.² with this nugget of cultural insight, my simple observational connection suddenly had some symbolic weight—not enough to include in the introduction to an exhibit, but certainly something to work with and, most likely, explore not so much with further thought but with actual art work.

 

i now have two major tracks of work i am toying with: one is an animation triptych of three examples of touching i have observed here, drawn with charcoal/conté in a monochrome mess of lines and shaded grit—photorealism has slipped down in importance—and accompanied by three looping sound pieces that form an overarching composition. i am still considering what positions to explore, but smoking is no longer one of them—see below for its alternative use. the short films are definitely inching closer to an extension of the perfect human: movement in terms of intimacy and abstraction, though the featuring of hands will keep them from drowning in the latter too much. i had a side-thought of the various types of hands at work: parent or grandparent and child or grandchild, lovers, and siblings or friends, but i'll keep considering other ideas.

 

as for the cigarette and koi imagery, i was looking for and found two things (everything is in two's, apparently!): one was some connection beyond the color orange, thanks to maggie, and the other was a third image to promote the associations i want to probe. it became obvious on the bus that streetlamps at night could work perfectly—then i'd have the natural/organic quality of the pond, the human/social characteristic of smoking, and the unnatural/inorganic property of sodium lamps, all with fairly-similar shades of orange. while i was originally considering creating these in charcoal, i am far more interested in theses images as oil paintings now. not only would this solve the issue of color (as charcoal wouldn't be capable of attaining the orange i'm imagining) but it would also act as a response to the number of oil paintings that have fascinated me here, including meng yangyang (shine art space) and song kun (at UCCA).

again: feasibility is the million-dollar-question now. can i produce around 50 drawings a day in about twenty days for three 12-second animations? can i also produce soundscapes to match? and can i edit all of these together and ensure a satisfactory exhibition in smith? finally, can i complete three larger oil paintings as well? i'm excited about all of these things, but am still unsure of their simultaneous completion. unfortunately it has been hard to fit in much sketching/storyboarding this week, but as we've started to get a feel for the hotspots in beijing (more on that in person!) and don't have to keep spending so much time just trying to not get lost on the way there, i hope to have more time to draw. i think that achievability will be better understood with a battle plan—so that will be my priority more and more from here on out.

 


1. i've realized that i often approach a project as a problem to solve—i know there's an optimal solution, and i seek to find it. is this how you approach art making? i can see benefits and risks to this kind of thinking, but i'm curious how trying to mash things together and work out how they fit together is as productive as i continually hope for.

2. i quoted from this link, but i'm sure there's more on this elsewhere. again, the firewall isn't helping me considering the fact that orange became a color of protest against chinese human rights issues during the lead-up to the beijing olympics—thus, the government isn't exactly keen on the color orange in the google search bar… http://everything2.com/title/chinese+colors