LIUYI HUANG
Critical Reflection
One core social motivation is belonging: we crave stable, meaningful connections with others. (The Social Animals, 2011, David Brooks)
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The manner in which our bodies and ideologies traverse various communities while at the same time getting influence from others and making small impacts on the whole of us, is what I am researching and making artworks about. Human beings as social animals, we travel through large and small collectives every day, joining and leaving, obtaining resources and help, and then feeding them back to others. But where did these various groups come from? How many people were involved in their formation and how much time did it take? My researching key range is to record and visualize the process and traces of their formation and impacts in order to present them to the audience.
In this part, I conducted research from the perspectives of sociology and psychology, and used photography, printmaking, and painting to practice emotional resonance and the physical existence of groups.
What a group may bring people with, and what is effecting them.
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In the book Why It Hurts to Be Left Out, I found a experiment two psychologists done, pointed out how mental pain is working better on individuals who been excluded other than people in collective.
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Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman used fMRI to scan the brains of college students to test the regions of the brain that were active when a student was excluded from a three-person catch-and-throw activity, and found that the activation pattern was similar to that seen when people endured physical pain. The situation is similar. The results suggest that psychological systems involved in human connection are linked to systems involved in physical pain signaling.
Like one summarize from book The Social Animals, a core social motivation is belonging: We crave stable, meaningful connections with others.
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Talking of beloning, it is also the reason I choose Qiang is between Han and Tibet, as my reference book.
Han people are the largest ethnic group in China, accounting for more than half of the population, as for Tibetans, most of the places where they live are plateaus, which has led to a long-term and solid regional autonomy. This book talked about one third ethnic group Qiang, which is living between two gaint groups.
In this book, the author conducted a folk investigation. In a village where many Qiang people live, he found many traces of integration with the other two ethnic groups from their folk stories, their costumes, and customs. However, in the emotinal point of view, people in village have strong bloodline theory hidden underneath. Olds who stay in and yonths who marry out have two totally different view on others.
Every diffrent view stand of one special history fragment. That means every single result shown form those people all has traces hidden in history.
What I want to emphasize is that most people can find ways to meet these universal needs and live peacefully in their societies. But for those who feel marginalized and alienated, the need to belong and be valued can be larger than life. As a tiny community like Qiang people's village is build on, people are more conciociate than others.
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How these conflicts happened.
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From the book A theory of cognative dissnance, Leon Festinger developed a theory about human motivation: Cognitive Dissonance Theory.
He can justify his actions by either cognitively minimizing the danger or exaggerating its importance in his life. One can gain a psychological relief by changing an existing attitude, by constructing a new one, or by doing both. All these efforts reduce dissonance by downplaying the absurdity of pursuing the wrong things like disease.
Therefore, for the Qiang people, simply treating people who do not belong to themselves or those who leave their group with a discriminatory attitude will allow their group to survive and continue in the various turmoils in history. From this perspective, the society we live in today is also in the same situation, excluding so-called ‘others’ in different communities to better unite. Even though everyone has discovered the negative consequences of discrimination and we can often see the process of people's efforts to correct it in movies, TV dramas, and literary creations now, discrimination and exclusion still stick to every community like chewed gum.
Depict people in an abstract way and convey emotions.
Notes I made when reading Apparitions Fottages and Rubbings from 1860 to now.
In the book Apparitions Fottages and Rubbings from 1860 to now, I summerized some defination about traces, it is also one thing that people feel from one specific situation. And so on, her/his mind thought becomes a trace when and where they been. Therefor I try to include emotions I have when doing the project, record my thingking traces and visual them.
Jeffery Camp Beach scene
Jeffery Camp Lovers on pakefield
Hidden characters in scene.
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Jeffery Camp's works give me inspiration bout how character subjects interact with scene harmoniously. His landscape, with its fluid effect, envelops the people in his paintings. My works in first and second section always wanted to have a feeling of flowing of time. Perhaps making the flow in printings have a special direction like been blowing by strong wind, and shaping the whole picture diagonally to one place will bring me more unique scene effects.
FrankenThaler Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1957
FrankenThaler Open Wall, 1953
Making characters more abstract.
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After seeing Franken Thaler's work, I start to chasing using color block to quickly draw portrits and environment.
The flowing sense here is more direct in his works, wobblingly going forward like an illusion.
What I wanna describe in my works are groups with no clear limits in reality, it is one kind of vague definition, so I don't really want to use exact portraits to represent different groups. One gaint color cube with complex or mixture objects is what I trying to explain as a crowd.
Moving Forward.
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As the topic continusly goning on, my research probably needs to have more about artists' works and techniques they used to achieve idea effect, especially on color using and layout of the pictures. For practicing, repeating and deepening one work is boring but it does bring me the desired effect. Maybe doing it again with other technical forms or using similar elements from the same topic will bring me new ideas.
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