The binding outside the museum reminds me that no matter the picture frame, rope or rules and laws, they are essentially restrictions on people, and restrictions will certainly bring people pressure.
Stress or psychological stress, is a response mode, refers to the animal body by the external adverse factors after stimulation, in the absence of specific pathological damage before a series of non-specific response.
Stress occurs when a stimulus event disrupts the balance and capacity of the organism, or exceeds the capacity of the individual.
So I went to the Natural History Museum to learn how wildlife protects itself from stress.

I found many good examples in the museum, such as the tip of the fugu, the warning color of the viper, the protective color of the chameleon and so on.
I also went to the exhibition of human evolutionary history by the way. Animals get protection mechanism by improving physiological functions and evolutionary organs, while humans protect themselves by inventing tools. One of the most ancient tools is rope. Knot development, has become today’s various forms of estrangement and restrictions.

The first thing I noticed at v&a was the frames. Works with different themes in different periods have different frames. Not only does the work come with its own frame, but many of the works will be covered with other frames by the museum. I am very interested in the role that the frame plays between the work and the audience. Why, once a work is framed, do we think it is owned, fixed and judged? When a work loses its frame, what happens to our attitude towards it? This extends to how we look at things other than art.

In order to learn more about picture frames, I visited a shop selling picture frames called Bourlet. They has made the finest frames for over 200 years and remains a notable authority on restoration and craftsmanship in the art world today.

Fortunately, the clerk was kind enough to introduce me to the history, internal structure and materials of the different frames. Therefore, I believe that the frame can reflect the owner’s social class and taste, and the information brought by the frame can affect the atmosphere of the whole work.

For this project, we were asked to choose an artefact from the v&a museum and use it as the inspiration for our work.

In the museum, my attention was all attracted by the picture frame, especially a small painting highlighted by my tutor, which was framed in three layers. Through a lock, the first layer of frame separates the inside and outside, making people realize that what is inside the frame is already occupied. The second layer of frame focuses the light on the painting, making people realize that what is in the frame can be appreciated and commented on. The third layer of frame let people realize the social status and aesthetic taste of the painting owner through its material and design.

I think in today’s world, the picture frame is everywhere, it can be a physical railing, rope, can also be the rules and inspection. I wanted to create a work of art that communicated to my audience the emotions I wanted to escape from this bondage.

Finally, my work is a video short film with sound as the theme and image as the auxiliary. It describes a story of a person who, due to the variation of social pressure, chooses to cut off the connection with society and drift in the disordered space.

According to the feedback of tutorial, my works still have the problem of unclear communication platform. Secondly, I use a lot of Chinese in my works, which makes it difficult for the audience to understand them well.

My tutor and I agree to translate only Chinese keywords to maintain the style of the work. Next, I will think more deeply about how to better convey my work to the audience.

This is a two-person project. My partner is Caio Caldas. We were asked to travel along a tube line, explore the city, and get inspiration from it. At the end of the project, we would use the inspiration to make interrelated works.

As I traveled, I recorded the smells I smelled and the shadows I saw at different times.

At the beginning of this project, I focused on the traditional British taxi, black cab. Due to the rise of uber, black cab has lost occupied a lot of market share in recent years. I take it for granted that black cab has a longer history and cultural background, so it is superior to uber, and selectively ignores the objective market rules that black cab is more expensive and more troublesome to book.

After tutorial, I realized that it was a mistake to ignore objective laws for speculation. I immediately decided to change my research topic and choose a direction that was more in line with Caio’s idea. Since Caio had previously worked on advertising, he felt the overabundance of flashy visual information in the city advertising obscured the plain truth. As a “victim” of black cab’s marketing efforts, I quickly focused on the dangers of consumerism.

After investigation, I found that many artists oppose consumerism by destroying their works, but such destruction always turns into another kind of added value, which makes their works more expensive. So I created my current work: I visualized the contradiction between my inner ideal and reality and made a collage. I printed this collage on the plate and broke it to form a common plate advertisement on social media to express my reflection on the industrialization of art education.

In the final presentation, I realized that my work still needs to be improved. First, the logical relationship between my inspiration and works is not clear enough. Second, I should think about how to promote my work so that it can communicate with the audience.

I think I can make posters of my work and reuse the leftover plate fragments.

The industrial revolution in the late 19th century, but it also caused many social problems. The Art Nouveau movement was born. The Artists began to pay attention to the Art form in nature and introduced them into the decorative design.

Nowadays, a similar problem has come back, ai technology has developed fast. Shortly, social structure and universal values are likely to suffer new shocks. I hope to follow the ideas of artists in the Art Nouveau. I will extract elements from nature and classical Art, Contrast and blend with contemporary mechanical elements to inspire people to rethink the relationship between people and technology.

My illustration integrates computer parts and decorative elements of ancient Roman Columns, which symbolize the contrast between technology and humanity.

According to the feedback I received, the mistake I made in my personal works is that, my work is lacking the support of speculative thinking behind, which seemed very pale and empty. I think that is because art nouveau is a decorative movement, I only focused on the order and decoration of works. I simply pieced together the elements I had collected without letting the historical context behind them come into play. I also did not find a clear audience, and did not form a communication with the outside world.

I think the following ideas can help me improve my works: since I am responsible for the binding design of zine, I can continue to expand the functions of fonts and interact with my illustrations. I can also increase the number of my illustrations to form a comic strip. I can also try to add background sound, so that my work forms a space of experience.

This is September 30r 30r 30ng’s first one-year project.

“ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE 1978-1979, NEW YORK”

The project has a better name: the cage.

“Solitary confinement, living in a cage for a year. Cage space is 11 feet 6 inches by 9 feet by 8 feet. One year, no verbal communication with anyone, no reading, no writing, no radio, no television.”

From the time he walked into the cage at 6 p.m. on Sept. 30, 1978, all he could do for the next year was wait for day after day, day after day.

For the first two weeks, the 28-year-old did some simple exercises but soon gave up. Instead, Xie Deqing began to imagine the cage as a community, with the bed representing home and the other three corners representing the outdoors, so just two laps in the cage could satisfy the needs of “going out” and “going home”. Of course, he had to work. Every day he made a mark on the wall, like a primitive man’s string.

Another way to pass the time is to do housework. Every few days, Xie Deqing wipes the floor. He also looked in the mirror and collected hair and pubic hair that had fallen out naturally. If you’ve ever meditated, meditated, waited for a bus, been in the hospital, or even been in a daze, you know how difficult it is to pass the time. In the first three months, Xie Deqing “thought of everything he could think of in his life”. For the rest of the day, all he could do was repeat scribbling, eating, sleeping, walking, cleaning, and moving on in a state of depression — a strategy because being positive or hyper makes it seem longer.

This state lasted until the last day, September 30, 1979, when he emerged from his cage, unable to speak to the audience and friends who had come to see the end of the work.

He spent the next two or three weeks resting, “when you realize that people are like wolves, aggressive, and I suddenly become vulnerable.”

This work made me think about the relationship between physical bondage, such as rope and cage, and social rules.

I think it begins with the first piece of rope picked up by a human being. The rope is one of the oldest human tools. People use it to connect what they like and isolate what they hate. An initially soft and simple thing, with the addition of the human factors, can be so aggressive in its use and blurry in its definition — it eventually becomes a fence, a shackle, and, of course, a frame. Over thousands of years of evolution, the rope has been woven into our genes. No matter what human beings see, they can’t restrain their primitive instinct and keep using the “rope” to restrict it. Therefore, the rope becomes rules and dogmas, which is everywhere in our lives.

The three pictures below show the smashing of a pottery urn by an artist named Ai Weiwei from the Han dynasty more than 2,000 years ago.

In 1995, the man “created” the performance artwork called “breaking a Han urn”, throwing one of a batch of Han urn jars he acquired in the 1990s into pieces for the camera, which was said to express his doubts about cultural and historical values.

He broke two pieces this time. The first one was cancelled because the cameraman failed to capture the landing process. In fact, if this person wants to express the above attitude, then his first “failure” is not more relevant? Why make three “perfect” pictures?

In 1994, he painted the Logo of Coca-Cola on a Han urn, which is said to express his thoughts on the conflict between current consumption and historic preservation.

The story is not over yet. Ai Weiwei, who quickly achieved great artistic achievements by his venting or doodle-style “re-creation”, could not have let these Han dynasty jars go quickly. In 2006, he took out dozens of Han urns and painted them with colourful paint, which is said to express his understanding of “contrast”.

The fate of the Han dynasty jars, which were forced to wear colourful clothes, did not end there. In 2014, they went on display at the Perez Museum in Miami, where photos on the back wall seemed to indicate the carnage to come.

A Miami-based artist named Caminero, who is said to be a fan of ai’s, smashed one of the urns off guard during a visit, inspired by the “breaking of a Han urn” on the wall. “Breaking a $1m urn in the name of art is only reasonable if it belongs to you,” Mr Ai said.

British art critic Jonathan thunders that the incident and ai’s subsequent response have blurred the line between destruction and creation and made ai’s image brittle.

But there is no need to worry, Ai Weiwei’s warehouse also has dozens of painted and waiting for Han dynasty urns that can be quickly replaced by smashed green urns. In fact, several of the Coca-Cola urns mentioned above were made, some of which were neolithic pottery.

Many artists try to oppose “consumerism” by destroying their works. As a result, such destruction does not remove the influence of consumerism, but turns into additional value, making their works more expensive. This confused me about the relationship between art and capital.

On December 1, 1987, Huang Yong Ping placed a classical Chinese art history book and a Western art history book into a washing machine and washed them for two minutes. These two long-standing histories were transformed into a pile of unreadable pulp within two minutes. One of the most famous Chinese artists on the post-1990s international contemporary art scene, Huang was born in Xiamen, China, in 1954. He went abroad in May 1989 to participate in the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou and has resided in Paris ever since.

This work directly points out that the interaction between cultures is instantaneous, without any logic.

Here are some of my thoughts. First of all, it is not difficult for us to understand the symbolic meaning; our country’s culture has always been full of symbolic meaning. Just as our excellent composition since childhood will tell us the relationship between tea tasting and life, we know very clearly that drinking tea has nothing to do with life, but we will still have an Epiphany sigh that tea is like life, first sweet and then bitter.

But in contrast, the work does not address the problem in a very complex form, or even a little perfunctory and violent. However, it is this seemingly random expression that accurately illustrates the core argument that the artist wants to express, which vividly criticizes the illogical mutual impact of contemporary social culture. I think this work is very appropriate, seemingly casual, actually impeccable.

In my opinion, I should be tolerant and casual in my artistic creation and not pay too much attention to cultural identity.