Final Project - Utopia

Utopia

The word “utopia” is often defined by a stockpile of ideas and images that have been already compiled for us through years of art, literature, music etc. Regardless of whether it is the psychological mind trip of Alice’s Wonderland, the eerie surreality of a Tim Burton film, or even the soft ethereality of a John William Waterhouse painting, the idea of utopia is ultimately slave to the user.

For me, utopia began with a struggle to reconcile how I felt about my Chinese heritage along with my family’s inability to acknowledge the distance from which I felt separated from the past. As a child, I followed the expected path of a second generation Chinese—fluent in Cantonese at the age of 4, learned English starting at 5, and 14 years later I am almost completely illiterate in my native tongue. Over Thanksgiving break, I had picked up a birthday card for my grandfather who lived in Hong Kong. My parents were pressuring me to finish signing my message so they could overnight the card. When it came time to put pen to paper, nothing came out. I couldn’t remember how to write my Chinese name and was forced to ask my mother to sign for me.

I wouldn’t say that I am in denial of my culture because that would be too cliché and too irresponsible of me. Instead, I feel that I have made the conscious decision to separate myself completely (for fear of insanity), only to casually encounter it on the few holidays I spend with my extended family. Instead of living in guilt that I could never justly dedicate myself to both my American and Chinese side, I have found it easier to accept that I do not feel an inherent connection to the latter.

In these photographs, I attempted to document the gradual overwhelming of a character that is not so different from myself. The red paint, while maybe a bit heavy handed, signifies my culture. As the character wanders home from school, she is progressively swallowed by the paint until the point of totality that is almost violent and grotesque.

The only difference is that I have gone in reverse and what little paint is still there, I am afraid to let go.

Tiffany Fung

Erwin Olaf

Erwin Olaf has many faces. I know him best for his "50 Years Old" series depicting his drastic aging and fall from grace. The photographs are appropriately titled "I Wish", "I Am", and "I Will Be" respectively.








However, Olaf has another series entitled "Grief" which depicts beautiful women straight out of the 1960s, trapped in their own beautiful homes in their beautiful bodies. The photographs are smooth and flawless thereby purposefully underscoring the present dark nature that pervades. The pictures themselves are perfectly plastic, but I think there's something missing that makes it a bit trite.

Kim Joon

"Tattoo and Taboo"

I guess these are sexy and compelling.

Michael Chelbin

These photographs remind me of a modernized, saturated Sally Mann. The eeriness of mature and stoic children never fails.

Geert Goiris

White Kangaroo?

Aldo Sperber - Indoor and Outdoor Works

French photographer Aldo Sperber creates a lot of images that feel instinctive in the sense that they harken to ideas we have in our heads of certain situations. However through his composition, use of color, and subtle twists on the variations within our minds, he fashions something completely other and completely magical in the process. His photographs appear to hang in a beautiful limbo somewhere between what we know from everyday life and the mysteriousness of a paralleling almost Alice in Wonderland-esque dimension. They bear a quiet type of elegance that invokes us to add the music.

Persona Project

Persona

Kurasawa’s Rashomon famously engages with the discrepancy between perception and recollection, ultimately putting to question the nature of reality. Is reality subjective?
The mutability of reality is central to the consideration of persona. We are forced to question whether appearances accurately communicate the reality of a personality, or whether what is on the surface can truly be deceptive enough to invalidate itself, making it nothing if not unreliable. For ultimately, everybody processes imagery different, making each experience one that can never justly be recreated for the next in line. If then, to what degree does an appearance speak to an identity?

In these photos, I play the role of a victim placed in bizarre but not improbable and eerily familiar locations. I had hoped to create a character that was placed in uncomfortable situations, which asked our minds to recall images that we had seen before. Yet these scenarios lacked just enough context, thereby making the image foreign.

Alienated from truly connecting and understanding this arbitrary persona, we try to relate them to what we know without realizing that we are trying to do the impossible. Essentially we futilely attempt to drag out from under the surface the very subconscious that we cannot understand causing us to conjure up anything and everything that can make tangible the intangible.
In the end, persona becomes the tool to expound upon the problem of façade and reconciliation of the unknown with the known by our minds. We launch a confusing dialogue within ourselves. In generating an anonymous character feigning death—the perennial victim— I beg to question: Do you believe it, does it make sense, how does it make sense… or have I simply articulated artifice?







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**final print did not have the shadow

Annabel Elgar

Assorted Works

More Maleonn

Because I really can't resist. A lot of his photos from this series have the sharpest edges withe warped senses of space that remind me of movie stills from Sweeney Todd. Obviously digitally manipulated, they still retain some sense of believability in that they're not completely airbrushed to the point of being plastic and overly smooth.

"Postman"

Liu LiJie - Another Episode

Contemporary Chinese art deals with its heritage through critique, praise, over-glorification, and self-confusion all at the same time. Liu LiJie's "Another Episode II" work addresses the space that he inhabits and how through examination and time, he has come to expound upon the idea that regardless of human interaction, each man truly is an island unto himself. It is this constant tug of war that leaves man in a state of limbo, this liminal space, that LiJie attempts to put into a visual context through barren and eerie images. He states:

" I take a gloomy view, and there exist a lot that I can’t control. I’m inclined to managing the years both I lived and am living into a scene compose by a computer. There I could pursue extreme simplism. It’s clear, unascertainable, and imperceptible. It is the years spoken out by my language, and there’s ultimate mysterious relationship about individual foreordination — it is a mere pint-sized world surmised by one person, and totally untrue to the original works. "

http://www.parisbeijingphotogallery.com/main/liulijieworks.asp













However for me, her other work under the similar title of "Another Episode" that was exhibited at the 2006 Fotofest in Beijing was much more mature and serious. In this series, Lijie captures scenes from her own private memories as a young girl. According to Holly Kyte, "Unlike most diaries, though, it's meant for public view and tells an 'Everygirl' tale of growing up. To achieve this, Lijie uses the universal language of fairytales. Her alter ego - a lone child-adult who is always wearing the same red dress - wanders through the frames like some kind of Little Red Riding Hood. And her journey, as in all good fairy tales, is one of innocent pleasures, flights of fancy and unexpected perils."

This work reminds me vaguely of Pierre et Gilles along with Julia Fullerton-Batten.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/48061,in-pictures,arts-fashion,the-big-picture-liu-lijie-photographic-memoirs