XINYUE ZHAO

i used the digital Painting, indesign and book binding workshop in order to finish my outcome.I Already learn a a lot about painting and indesign while doing last two project in last term. During the process in this project, I learned how to bind a book by thread and needles. It was a very delightful experience for me to learn such a skill, because it is not only interesting but also very useful for me. And then I use it to bind my magazine in this project’s process.

I redraw some of my preliminary sketch in canvas first with acrylic paint First. It was exactly what I wanted but unfortunately I find that it is hard for me to scan such a thick material.

Then i give up the ideas of drawing in cavnas, I redraw them in photo shop and then print them, it was more effective and the color is more precise although I lost some texture of them.

I also draw some other pictures after I found that would be too dull if I only draw all my project in just 5 colors. I draw something more colorful and plentiful, and also add some words and numbers to improving effect.

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But the machine in our school can not print such a big size, so i can only print them in 20*20 square size, it is very pity because I really want to make a magazine in that big size at first.

I think the things I need to improve in this project is that I didn’t put my own thoughts as much as I put in the second project, i just draw the band and the members in that.

After diciding the theme and collect enough items. I started to do the secondary research.

i find that all of the vinyls have their own unique and and representative covers, which reflects the process behind the product, the band’s living situations, their attitudes and their throughout. They are so representative that you can recognize them without seeing a face of any member of a band and even without read the title on it. I’m interested in how can they grasp the chatacter of the bands and their music so i want to try to drawing the people without their face and see if i still recognize them or not. Luckily, it was successful.

then while reading books in the library, i found a artist named Charley HARPER, i was imperessed by his brilliant, vibrant painting of natural subjects including birds, fishs and insects. He used version simple shape to draw them, but these simple shape can also express precisely what he was drawing and what he want to express I love this kind of printing very much so I try a lot to draw like him

He calls his work minimal realismin,which objects are shaped with as few visual elements as possible.Then i tried to use less color and the brief shape which target much more precisely to the figure

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When it comes to the theme Collection, The first thing that comes to my mind is my collection of the animals

I am a animal lover and especially love the family Flidae and parrots. As a collector, I started to collect collect them since I was a kid from some regular cattons and birdies, and now thanks to my family’s support I have my own serval ,savannah cat and one of the most rare parrots in China. During my collection I learned how to gangne the trust of the breeder abroad and how to deal with them. So at first I wanted to do the project about my animal collection. But during the practice I found that it was hard to integrated the information of them so I decided to change my theme.

Then I decided to do the project with my vinyls or pens. I found that it is easier to collect vinyls in London than buy a pen, so I started to work towards the collection of vinyls.

This exhibition makes people think deeply about eating. In the past, eating was just a normal thing for me, like breathing. I never take the time to think about what it means to eat. After watching the exhibition, I have some new ideas.

First and foremost, all mammals, including humans, suck at birth. Even before the baby’s eyes are open, it is an instinct to look for the mother’s nipples to nurse to life. No one teaches newborn babies how to drink breast milk, but the ability for survival drives them to suck hard. The experience of babies tells us that people eat to live, not live to eat. However, with the improvement of people’s living standards, more and more people pursue to eat delicious and healthy food. Food became a status symbol. People who can eat delicacies in fancy restaurants are often considered to obtain individual wealth. The difference in diet became the basis for dividing people into social classes. As a result, some people mistakenly believe that people live to eat (Fisher 92). These people’s misconceptions contradict the mechanical behavior of eating at the birth of life.

In the second place, eating is of considerable significance to human evolution and development. In general, humans are superior to other creatures by learning how to use tools. The use of fire is an outstanding example. By learning to use fire, the man slowly learned to eat cooked food. Cooked food contains far fewer bacteria and parasites than raw food, so people are less likely to get sick. The body better absorbs the protein in cooked meat. Eating cooked food has contributed to human evolution to some extent.

Last but not least, eating drives the formation of different human cultures. Differences in diet make for physiological differences in humans. Different foods have different meanings for different races. As a result, some food is often placed in the human missing and feelings, such as Chinese dumplings.

reference

Fisher, Mary Frances Kennedy, and Joan Reardon. The art of eating. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Cuba is one of the five socialist countries in the world. Its history and culture are unique. The United States imposed a decade-long blockade on Cuba in the last century. As a result, Cuba has suffered severe setbacks, both politically and economically. Since Cuba and the United States are both located in North America, Cuban culture is influenced by the United States (Malitsky12). Until the 1930s, many Cuban cinemas showed American films. But with the success of the 1959 revolution, more and more Cuban films were produced to celebrate the revolution. Film posters have also appeared along with the boom in Cuban cinema.

The Cuban poster exhibition is not only a nostalgia for the films of the last century but also a memory of Cuba’s history. Film posters allow viewers to travel back in time to revolutionary Cuba. The audience can feel that although Cuba is only a weak country, all the people have the courage to carry out a great revolution to save the country from danger. It can be said that Cuban movie posters are a kind of revolutionary art. Red and passion are a feature of Cuban movie posters. The communist ideology was fully embodied in the movie poster.

With no capital restrictions, Cuban movie posters are creative. Artists use exaggerated lines and symbols to express what they want to convey. The intense colors express the strong feelings of the artist. Also, hand-operated screen printing makes Cuban movie posters unique and valuable. These movie posters can bring a sharp shock to the audience. In other words, Cuban movie posters not only attract the audience to watch the movie but also arouse people’s curiosity about the movie poster itself. It can be quickly concluded that Cuban movie posters are unique art in themselves.

Reference:

Malitsky, Joshua. Post-revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery are two artists who are good at using bodies to combine social consciousness and art together. “Artworks play an important role in establishing visual and discursive space related to social practices associated with disease regimes” (Radley 366). In the free exhibition, they use their artworks to show the deep meaning of chronic illness for people’s lives and make the audience rethink the identity of misbehaving bodies.

It is obvious that the untypical bodies in the current society are often marginalized and many people do not understand the behavior of Jo Spence that she shows her untypical body for the audience. The society lacks care for people with chronic illness or untypical bodies, and even does not give them enough respect and equal rights. Jo Spence’s work is like a self-portrait of pathology. “Spence’s photographs are narratives of living with cancer that incorporate visual andtextual elements” (Bell 05). The patient takes pictures of herself as part of her life experiences or gives them meaning. Compared with the abstract art language, this kind of more concrete pictures and objects are obviously more persuasive. Jo Spence is a key figure in the photography field in the 1980s. She plays an important role in the criticism expression. Her works involve a variety of photographic styles and respond to the social dispute in a direct way. She firmly believes that when photography is applied to complex problems such as class, power, gender, health and body, it has a kind of authorized ability. From this point of view, Jo Spence has focused on confronting all forms of hegemony, dominance and control, including the public’s stereotype of ‘misbehaving’ or ‘untypical’ bodies. These profound themes become the main creative elements of her works. In this exhibition, many of her works call for people to reflect on the meaning of life and encourage people to correctly view the illness and changes of the body. She bravely exposes the real side of the disease, just like her work “The Picture of Health”. In this work, she uses her own photos to show the trauma of cancer and change people’s general conception of cancer patients. She is both the victim and heroin during the treatment process. Her other work “The Final Project” reflects her idea that the human body belongs to nature, which in accordance with Oreet Ashery’s artistic idea.In the exhibition, Oreet Ashery’s works also make the audience rethink the significance of their bodies, whether the body is healthy or ill. What’s more, Oreet Ashery wants more people to know that their death is not the end and all people in this world should be treated equally. Ashery exposes the reality that many patients are marginalized when they seek proper treatment. The artwork “Revisiting Genesis” is evidence to prove her idea. In this 12-part mini-series, the audience can find different characters with different diseases, who face social marginalization because of their special identity. The artworks make people understand that disease gives people the opportunity to re-recognize life. The struggle, crying and asking for help in diseases express people’s real needs for life and nature. If people seriously face the disease, they will find that its torture process is actually to mobilize the potential of human life and awaken people’s awe of nature. To some extent, disease makes man and nature unified. Disease is more like a rehearsal of death and a warning. The contemplation of disease and these ‘untypical’ bodies can help people give up the unimportant things in life and get more freedom. But if the warning is resisted, people may pay a greater price. Only when the disease comes, people will lose their mask and become pure and real in constant reflection. So these patients and special bodies cannot be ignored and marginalized by society

In short, the exhibition with the theme of misbehaving bodies shows the artistic theme of Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery’s works. “Artworks also tell about illness experience and are used as claims to social justice” (Radley 219). They hope that society will give enough attention and respect to disease groups. Illness makes some groups have special social identities and make them face the stereotype of the public. This goes against the natural relationship between human body and life. So people should consider illness with common mentality and explore the real meaning of life.

Reference:

Bell, Susan E. “Photo images: Jo Spence’s narratives of living with illness”. Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Newsletter, IEEE 6.1, 2002, pp. 5-30.

Radley, Alan and Bell, Susan E. “Artworks, collective experience and claims for social justice: The case of women living with breast cancer.” Sociology of Health & Illness, 29.3, 2007, pp.366-390.

Radley, A. , and Bell, Susan E . “Another way of knowing: Art, disease and illness experience”. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 15.3, 2011, pp. 219-222.

In V&A Museum I saw a group of snuffbox associated with Frederick II and these boxes impress me deeply especially this one. 

This English box proves the international fame of Frederick II after Seven Years War .The idealized portrait on this box shows him in his twenties, when he was a crown prince of Prussia. In fact  Frederick The Great was in his fifties when the box was made, that inspired my idea because I thought he became a totally different person when he got older

Because Trudi told me to use the illustration to tell story. I decided to make this magazine without words and shows the life of Frederick the great and the difference between the world he was dream of and the real world.

the cover shows the old king and his shattered dream when he was young, and the snuffbox I saw in V&A museum.And in the first picture, the left side shows that when he was eighteen years old he and his friend’s plan Of running away to England because he didn’t want to be a king . And it caused  his closest friend’s death in the right side.

The second picture illustrated when he became a king, he was waging war and turn Prussia in to a highly militarized state, but he also built Sans Souci Palace and continued playing music in there.

The last picture is about his death and his achievement of win the land of Silesian.

In this project,I visited south Kensington and the museums,at first I wanted to do a magazine about the museums or the history of human’s inventions

And then I found that they are not even interesting so I changed to doing a magazine about a snuffbox I have seen in V&A museum

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This English box proves the international fame of Frederick II after Seven Years War .The idealized portrait on this box shows him in his twenties, when he was a crown prince of Prussia. In fact  Frederick The Great was in his fifties when the box was made, that inspired my idea because I thought he became a totally different person when he got older.

At the first of my creative journey, I compared him when he was young and old through the books in the library of our school ,I found out lots of difference and I wondered what caused him to active like that for example what this prince who loved art of peace and a philosopher king who even wrote The Anti- Machiavel with Voltaire waging war and began to turn Prussia into a highly military state? Why this culture prince became a man who dress in a plain blue uniform and shows the act of self effacement? 

After reading the books about him, I found out one of the most important reasons is that he was grew up in an environment where he was absolutely forbidden to be what he wanted to be. His father didn’t allow him to study music and Latin cause the struggle between father and son, and then caused him hatched plan to run away to England. And that led to his closest friend’s execution. After all these dramatic experiences, he resigned to his dynastic obligations as hier to throne, but he started threw up defenses around him self and became a highly artificial person. It also caused self effacement in his entire life.

Another thing I found that interested me was the place San Souci, which means “without a care”in English. It situated in Potsdam ,away from the bustle of the royal court in Berlin, Sans souci was the Frederick’s spiritual home, its inner circle is looked to France for its intellectual inspiration. He invited Voltaire And other philosophers to have discussions and dinner there for many years. Combing with the name of the place, it seems that his idea of this place was to live in the world he was dream of and the real world.

Because Trudi told me to use the illustration to tell story. I decided to make this magazine without words and shows the life of Frederick the great and the difference between the world he was dream of and the real world.

In this picture, the left side shows that when he was eighteen years old he and his friend’s plan Of running away to England because he didn’t want to be a king . And it caused  his closest friend’s death in the right side.

This picture illustrated when he became a king, he was waging war and turn Prussia in to a highly militarized state, but he also built Sans Souci Palace and continued playing music in there.

The last picture is about his death and his achievement of win the land of Silesian

I used the watercolor to draw the cover, it shows the old king and his shattered dream when he was young, and the snuffbox I saw in V&A museum.
I was very delightful to draw these pictures and it is very interested to experience the edition and printing process. I think that helps me a lot to understand the editors I cooperate with and publishers I’m working with.

I used the watercolor to draw the cover, it shows the old king and his shattered dream when he was young, and the snuffbox I saw in V&A museum.

It takes me two days to draw these two pictures, so after finishing that i found that I have no time to draw the rest six pictures if I continue to use watercolor. So I decided to change to use digital space to draw things inside

Because Trudi told me to use the illustration to tell story. I decided to make this magazine without words and shows the life of Frederick the great and the difference between the world he was dream of and the real world.

In this picture, the left side shows that when he was eighteen years old he and his friend’s plan Of running away to England because he didn’t want to be a king . And it caused his closest friend’s death in the right side.

This picture illustrated when he became a king, he was waging war and turn Prussia in to a highly militarized state, but he also built Sans Souci Palace and continued playing music in there.

The last picture is about his death and his achievement of win the land of Silesian.

then I went to print them but unfortunately the print store I went give me a booklet with totally different colors so I have to print them again by myself

Although I did it in hurry, I succeefully done it

I was very delightful to draw these pictures and it is very interested to experience the edition and printing process. I think that helps me a lot to understand the editors I cooperate with and publishers I’m working with.

In this class we are asked to bring one personal thing that connected to ourselves. I brought one pen that my boy friend gave to me as a gift in my eighteenth birthday and it was also a gift his father gave to him in 1999 when he was eighteen. And my friend brought a rouge that her friend gave to her.i think This class is a very good chance to share our things with each other and it is also very interesting to discover stories behind them