At the art fair Unseen, I bought a book—Piece of Colonne. Fragments of Waves.—from a Japanese artist, Tamami Linuma. I mainly reference the book as a basic idea for the publication I am making for the research festival as the framing, material, and size of the book catch readers’ eyes even though there’s no text at all just printed images in the book. But without any text, just images is exactly what Tamami is looking forward to since she’s trying to make all colored images as an infinite wave. All colored images were captured by a memo block Tamami occasionally found on the street. “ The memo block was in the shape of a spiral, with seven colors of paper (light yellow, light red, light blue, dark yellow, dark red, dark blue, and green) with one side glued and more glossy than the other three. Attracted by the decorative nature of this block, Tamami piled them up to make a »colonne/ column« and photographed them under natural light.”
Dobokay Mate offered two conceptual shooting methods in his works. About his spots series of works, he uses chemical treatments to control polaroid light reactions, thus, having images seem like real places but indeed unreal. TAIE is one of his series playing with color by taking photos of the actual landscape but without a lens. After a certain time of exposing, he will get smooth but blurred colored images. Compared with my works Testament: Mourn a cloud when dawn comes, my shooting method is straightforward, using zoom-in screenshots from daily actualy landscape shooting. So talking with artists really builds up my knowledge on how to experiment with machines and photographic concepts.
Related link: https://dobokaymate.art/taie
In unit 3, I am still working on my project Testament, with the topic highlighted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, “ There is but one truly serious philosophic problem and that is suicide.” The core concept of my project is still about death, identity, and dreams. Working on finding out the truth of why some people including me fancy death is like a process of reeling silk from cocoons which needs to be analyzed by lines. Therefore, while reading Camus to understand the concept of suicide or death from his perspective, I am also defining and writing death from my perspective by making Testament collections.
For a long time, I fancied the light reflection through churches’ windows. So inspired by Japanese designer Aya Kishi’s work After the rain “ by incorporating a series of optical prisms into the centres of tombstones, which as a result, create a spectrum of light on the ground where the grave would be situated,”(Aya,2013) I decided to print my works on a certain material which allow the light goes through and creating same photographic shadows.