Research and Critical Reflection
My research starts with story telling and goes through three layers of meaning, from 'psychological' to 'physical' to 'public'. From personal emotional expression, to emotional visualization, and then to bringing the figurative image into the public view, the emotional theme of my research finally infiltrates into the real life of each audience. The aim is to appeal to all people's positive emotions while reconciling their own emotions and the real ones in nature.
I started out as a creative storyteller, making up my own stories, discussing issues in a whimsical and playful painting style, and adding my own thoughts to the details.
Then I became obsessed with journal-type sketches, writing down ideas in my life every day.
Later ON, I found that repetitive painting could help me to record the emotions I wanted to express in a simpler and more affectionate way. So I chose to repeat the daily record of the toothpaste foam and began to make art of the shape of the toothpaste foam through Pareidolia.
Pareidolia is a common psychological phenomenon. The human brain tends to attach a specific meaning to an image or sound from the outside world. Does this mean happened to see the image will become the carrier of thought, that is associated with thinking or remembering. When you're doing nothing at all, just repeating a single action, basically undisturbed thinking, the images you see afterwards are a good reflection of what you were thinking. This includes emotions.
This is where the initial emotional narrative comes in. In the follow-up, I wanted to reify emotions, partly because of the influence of Yvonne Feng. Her research is to visualize her mother's story. To examine the ability of painting to represent memories, events, and atrocities by examining the discourse of historical paintings and other related artistic practices. From the perspective of the individual, it penetrates into the wider social context, aiming to seek new forms of expression that existed during a period of great political and cultural change, and to provide new ways of engaging in the experience of others through the figurative vision of painting.
C’est La vie, Oil on canvas, 120x 110cm, Yvonne Feng, 2021
I've thought a lot about choosing a vehicle to visualize emotions. I was doing a study on the relationship between nature and human beings, and I noticed an experiment. Baxter, discovered in February 1966. He connected the polygraph to an agave plant, watered the plant, and a wave pattern appeared on the polygraph, similar to the curve of human pleasure. He tried to burn the leaves. When he got close to the plant, there was a sharp wobble on the polygraph, and the plant felt a strong sense of fear. When approached by a plant pretending to burn its leaves, the plant did not respond. Plants are actually aware of what's going on in their minds. At first he thought it was a coincidence, but after many iterations, he thought that plants might have their own consciousness and emotions, and could communicate with things around them through quantum entanglement.
Pseudoscience or not, what plants are showing is real. So I chose to use wood as a carrier, so you can see in my second series, everything is wood texture. Above, I have completed the creative research from 'psychological' to 'physical'.
Anna Bunting-Branch's methodological study of feminist science fiction on publicizing artistic creation, following Luce Irigaray's assertion that "things can think differently", addresses these issues through the practical approach of feminist science fiction: by making, reading, and writing. This provides a practical way of thinking.
I also want to bring my emotional research into the real life of the audience. But I'm taking the dialectical approach that when you want to prove something exists, you're already in it. So I combined pareidolia with plants to create something that looks both like plants and like objects we see everywhere -- like bowling balls or human faces. Really let the audience see the existence of emotions in life, and face the emotions.
