Key Words: social issues, problems between or from people, mental illness, remaking, gothic style, black and white, photography, post-retouch, post-painting, PS, artist research, Jeff Wall, Henry Wallis, Helena Almeida

Rework Content: < Seven >, a group of text free pictures improved and sublimated from primary research (Contains 6 pictures)

Work Content: < Illusory Fantasy, Authentic Phantasm >, two series of photographs taken with a text story (Contains 18 pictures)

Because I spent a lot of time in the hospital, and due to the hospital network, most of my finished work and research were on Sketchbook this time.

— Work Preview

—Research And My Feeling About This Artist

The authenticity of photography, the boundary between photography and painting, the boundary between high and low artistic taste.How to choose the Angle to recreate the history, how to use the lens to create the picture.

Exposed Social Problems: violence and a series of problems commonly seen in the streets due to the gap between the rich and the poor, class issues and so on.

• Jeff Wall

Wall’s photographs are called “photographic conceptual art”, and the artist is also the most famous in contemporary art photography, and has even been described as the “Andy Warhol” of photography.

Milk is a derivative of what Jeff Wall saw and heard on the street. In the picture, the Milk in a man’s hand presents a complex organic form, frozen in an unpredictable shape. All the subjects he chooses include violence, poverty, race, class, etc. However, he escapes from the documentary itself and enlarges the social problems behind the pictures by recording a carefully constructed picture.

How to use the existing historical resources as their inspiration, and then use their own skills to “reproduce” the emotions they want to express.

Exposed social problems: artificial external factors to human physical and mental aspects of the great damage.

• Henry Waillis/ Sir John Everett Millais

As you can see, this page is a continuation of Jeff Wall’s research. I investigated more artists who reproduced historical pictures or work of this kind.It is a known fact that Ophelia is one of the characters in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Hamlet. She is ruthlessly abandoned as part of Hamlet’s mad revenge plan, and her father’s death brings her into a delirium, where she slips into the water and dies.

The death of Ophelia has been recreated by many artists since ancient times, like Henry Wallis on the left, who borrowed Thomas, an equally romantic poetry collector and creator who committed suicide by poisoning in his attic at the age of 28, to create similar images.

Not just photography, not thinking about what’s in front of you, learning to use what you know and what you can use. Using paintings to combine photography to achieve a dynamic effect.

Exposed social problems: the stereotype of the past, and the general prejudice of men against women in society.

• Helena Almeida

My body as a drawing, myself as My own work.As Almeida said, in her work, the body is at the same time a sculptural form and the concept of space. Through photography, Helena Almeida has established a strong relationship between expression (the art of painting) and expression (her own body as the “medium” for this act).

At the same time, Almeida’s creations are highly expressive, and photography is both a record of her actions and a carrier of the concept of a mixture of media and body. In her work, canvases, paints and materials become wearable objects for the skin, or the body; In the physical interaction with the artist, the composition elements of painting become a conscious reality and gain real materiality. All this is definitely presented in the form of photography.

The female body in this work is the medium of rubbing blue pigment, which is flattened and superficial. Throughout the course of their actions and in the final product, their subjectivity is erased, leaving only the Klein blue in the shape of their feminine biological characteristics.

Almeida used her work to hit this objectification of the female body by the male gaze. In many of Almeida’s work, she struggles against “Blue”. Blue pigment she uses is close to Klein Blue, and she always opposes Klein’s use of women as the background of her paintings. “Blue Female Art” is a liberating act that marks Almeida’s artistic temperament.

In 1977, Almeida created a series of works “in Inner Improvement”. With the use of superimposed media, she seemed to be eating Klein blue paint or devouring it, which was also Almeida’s release of her Inner heart and resistance to societal sexism. Adding acting elements to represent an active use of feminist and revolutionary positions.

She seems to be asking us to think about how we think about self-portraits: when we try to see the artist as an artist, in revealing the people behind the work, she is never bound by our curtains of expectation or our transcendental ideas about creation, genius or gender.

—Research Summary

Jeff Wall/Henry Wallis: how to make full use of the knowledge you have mastered to interpret a work completely, and how to create it again while retaining the essence of the original work.

Helena Almeida: reasonable and perfect use of painting to describe their photographic work, so that they can really “move” up.

—My Thoughts On Production

This piece is completely step-by-step. Since the topic is about social issues and “Demonstration”, in the initial primary research, I took a group of pictures centered on “double-dealing” called < Mask and Rose >.

· The first shooting attempt was mainly to evaluate the shooting atmosphere needed for this work and whether it was suitable for off-site shooting and production. However, due to the epidemic situation and the need to return to China for ear treatment later, I chose the more convenient indoor shooting, and summarized the shortcomings in the first shooting, so that I could find the state as soon as possible in the later shooting.
Because this time the shooting is too rough, not only the set but also the props.I was too concerned about the choice of props before, but finally when I received the props, the quality of the props was not satisfactory to me, and when I was waiting for the props, I did not carefully choose the exterior scene, which led to my later choice of props and scenes was very “perfunctory”. Therefore, I decided that, apart from the final shot, I also wanted to remake the research and shooting of the “mask”.

· Social problems I want to embody
Seven negative thoughts of the seven deadly sins.
Human common psychological disease depression to bring harm to people, and may lead to external social factors. (also pyramid schemes/sex trafficking organizations/human trafficking, campus/social violence or isolation/patriarchal, and LGBT)

· I first wrote two short modern poems for my final work before deciding on how to take the pictures. And they both use metonymy to express what I want to express. By the way, all the characters I want to shoot are women, because in contemporary society, the status of women is far less than that of men, and women are the group that most easily causes discussion on social problems.

In the Dark-Purple Onion, I think of the girl as an Onion. She is just like any vegetable in the basket, one day lucky to be picked up by the people “play”, they will “buy” her home will depend on her fresh degree, that is, whether she is attractive enough. But this time she apparently met a picky eater who wanted a fresher version of her, not “fresh” Onions as the mud-coated sellers called them, so they peeled off her shell to enable them to pursue a more perfect meal. At last their aim was achieved, and they had this “instant pleasure”, and then they put her back in the basket as if they had never been there, had done nothing to her, and had not had the “fresh Onions, so delicious that you will never regret them”, as the seller had originally called them.

Obviously, there is a simulated human trafficking/sex trafficking/surrogacy scene. It will makes one wonder why the girls are in such an environment.

In the Azure-Blue Sky, only two main characters appear here, one is the girl, the other seems to be the unpredictable nature. In the beginning, there is a sign that a storm is coming, and all the builders seem to be merciless towards everything at first, but when its rain falls on the girl, she cries out to the girl to run, just because it will get her wet.But the girl chose to stay here, why? Because she loved it, the warmth of its softer side, but also the bad side, because she could always find something better in it, such as the smell of the earth after a storm, such as the rainbow that always rose after the sun.

In this little story, you might think of a mental illness like depression.This girl can be themselves, who yearn to be better when they’re not sick. But this girl can also be someone from the outside who really loves them and encourages them. And the culprit behind all this is the mental illness, the patient himself. The cry in the middle states that they don’t want such a complex mentality either, but they can’t stop themselves from raining. Maybe they canot do anything about it, but they can still make a rainbow after the rain.

· After the conception of the story, I began to shoot around these two stories.I first decided to adopt the cover of my story, which was two “mirror reflection” pictures from different time periods and different places.The reason I choose this set of pictures is that people are convinced whether it’s positive or negative, whether it’s the real world or mirror/water (real self/Internet spread etc.), but the only difference is which side has the loudest argument.

· Besides, after I determined the composition and took the pictures, I made reasonable use of the post processing method of using PS mentioned by the teacher in the course.
And because of the artists I researched, I reproduced and paid tribute to a group of my favorite Helena’s work (ruined Painting/ 1976).Since I had no idea how Helena handled her images, I simply used Photoshop for post-production.In this process, I made judicious use of the knowledge I learned from the artists I researched. I not only successfully reshoot the work I wanted to shoot. But also combined painting and photography very well.

Below are Helena’s works that I chose to study and my finished products. (The order is shuffled, but you can read the correct order in my PDF)

Story 1, Dark-Purple Onion: human trafficking or control for sale and use/patriarchal

I chose red to represent blood, as well as persuasive personality manipulation. The horizontal line on the brick and on the wrist of the final image is the same, representing the end of the girl’s suicide by cutting her wrists.
In the first picture at the beginning of the story, the gun against the girl’s head represents her strong resistance to being trapped in such an environment, and instead of blood, a mouth shoots out from behind, indicating that she has been manipulated or brainwashed by the person who created the environment.
She is elected by the diners, which means that she will betray herself again and her original thoughts. She can only be forced to kill herself again so that her “new self” can forgive her for being low and helpless in this environment.
The reason she was not chosen was because she was a “painted commodity,” like this line, the appearance she presented to the outside world was packaged.
And often, in the intense brainwashing or long-term trapped in this environment and can not escape from the people, they will eventually be completely controlled and unable to extricate themselves, they will even become the next to manipulate others. Their hearts are dead.
But when you peel off her skin layer by layer, in the depths of your heart, in the depths of darkness, they are often eager for affection, for love, for free.
But unless someone can rescue them from such a situation, they end up day after day reconciling with their packaged selves and then sinking  again.

In the last picture you can see that the girl’s hands have four characters: her father, her mother, me with a cross drawn, and her brother. Except for me, the other three were all smiling.This represents one of the social problems I want to express. In China, it is a very common phenomenon that sons are preferred over daughters. Due to the imprisonment of some parents by traditional ideas, they generally believe that giving birth to a girl is not as good as giving birth to a boy, so before and after giving birth to a boy, they will abandon or even abuse the girl/girl to varying degrees, even to the extent of torture and murder. You can reintroduce the story from the point of view that I’m speaking about.

Story 2, Azure-Blue Sky: mental disorders such as depression/LGBT issues

Before the story begins, the gigantic shadow projected behind is the pathogen that entangles the depression patients. (You can also learn about the difficult process of trying to find a place in society for LGBT people) Throughout the process, the gray patch acts as the little thing in their head that keeps them going, whether it’s a loved one, a pet, or the few things they like left.
They are just trying to embrace themselves, to embrace who they are as they are, and even to embrace the world that has made them, and you can see, at the same time, the shadows behind them are following them.
Therefore, when they want to hug but finally hugged herself only (what all have no, even a little support herself through the idea of), they how desperate, it’s also one of the reasons why the most depressed patients finally chose to commit suicide, they in this world is no longer something worth as a souvenir.
But at the end of the story, she actually hugged someone, and “it” heard someone say they loved it for the first time. The shadow in the background is now two people, but the shadow no longer looks scary or lonely. To us, it looks like they are even kissing.

· Then, as usual, I used some familiar software for typography and text insertion.
Originally, I planned to format them all into horizontal format and divide the mirror image of the cover, but finally I gave up this idea and made them into vertical format, so that everyone could better understand the meaning and effect of the mirror that I wanted to express on the covers usual, I used some familiar software for typography and text insertion.

— Rework of < Mask and Rose >

This time, I telephotography the investigation works of the mask series based on the light shooting practice I had done in the early stage and the shortcomings of the first shot.In this case, I choose animals as the entry point, because different animals can represent different characters.

Then, because I am not difficult to be proud, I focused on shooting the section of Pride.But in the end you can see the Envy, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, Anger, I didn’t shoot the lazy reason is that the “I happen all too lazy to photograph”. Obviously, this is the most fruitful way to interpret this character.

— SWOT in This Time

• Strengths

I have lots of ideas for my project and I can work it both on blog and sketchbook. 
I know how to transform them into art work.
My photography skills are strong, and I know how to use some machine to develop my ideas.
I do things gradually, and know how to extract better things from the previous projects to learn, and also found some shortcomings in this time to do better.

• Weaknesses

I’ve got almost everything done, but I just can’t make a better time schedule to blog ahead of time. Or the next time I need to ask myself not to work so hard in the early stages that I have nothing to do in the later stages.

• Opportunities

So far, there is nothing to improve. I need to keep this reasonable idea of cooperating with classmates and going to the studio to shoot.

• Threats

Just the same thing in weaknesses.
Perhaps one more should be added. I have always been good at writing because I have always loved writing, but I can’t be just proud of that. I need to communicate my ideas with teachers more diligently in class.