Nameless @yamiyokage - Tumblr Blog

Tramway Handles

https://artblart.com/tag/formalist-photography/

Tramway Handles, by Boris Ignatovich, 1930s.

One of the examples of formalism in photography, composition of repetitive objects which forms a certain structure which creates a strong visual impact.

In relation with the website content, a lot of architecture photographs were often taken in certain artistic framing since most of the building structure were symmetrical or otherwise the attached objects (such as windows) were repetitive, therefore the majority and of course the main goal of architecture photography is to showcase the beauty of the structure. Its beauty is coming from significant form, in many cases the visual aspects was more important than the meaning of the building, unless the artist tends to tell stories behind the building or even make it as pure documentary.

#Lecture 9

Experimental Relationship

http://www.pixyliao.com/experimental-relationship

Experimental Relationship, by Pixy Liao, 2007 - ongoing.

Pixy Liao as a Chinese female artist, challenges the tradition in Asian dating culture with this experimental photo series, questioning gender role, sexual traits, female embodiment and empowerment in the society.

As a Asian female, I have experienced living in both Taiwan and Australia, staying in a Chinese background household, even though my mother is very open minded with my traits and personality, but sometimes it is unavoidably people around trying to teach me about the things I “needed” to follow to be / performed as a “mature female” (or even mature adult).

We grew up and unrecognisably slowly shaped to satisfy male gaze, to fulfil gender roles and stereotypes given, following rules, being modified and objectified just because we were born in a female body.

This mindset comes across dating and marriage scenarios, Asian people suggest dating people at least the same age or older not only because they may be mentally mature, but most of the time they expect to be more “reliable or financially stable”, so they can take care of the female in the relationship. That's the reason Pixy wrote under the website, her friend said ‘To choose a boyfriend the way a man would choose a girlfriend’.

We should try to break the gender role, not only for the female but also making up spaces for any gender which suffers due to the structure of patriarchal society.

When it comes to my personal artwork, although I thought I rarely make work about feminism, but since one of my past work expressing about gender role and personal traits; the new series were inspired with a personal romantic relationship experiences. I'm trying to open up a private conversation, to inspire people by telling the story with art.

#Lecture 8

Dualism

Coming and growing up from a Taoism / Buddhism background, my perspective shifted towards Buddhism or even Zen concept compared to Plato or Descartes theory.

Taoism believes that there is a dualism of yin and yang, but it is not an absolute opposite relationship. In Buddhism, it goes a step further and rejects dualism, holding that all things are "not one and not two". They are the senses produced by the respective objects of all living beings. They are all relatives, but they are only attached to their existence, and there is no real opposition. Take the example of a blind man touching an elephant.

#Lecture 7

SEND IN A CLOUD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dAY6xI87wQ&t=5s

SEND IN A CLOUD, by Cheng Tsung-lung, 2022.

A performing piece (contemporary dance) by the Cloud Gate, produced by Cheng Tsu-lung.

Somehow in relation with the continued content of expressionism, connect with symbols, a collage expression of emotion, senses, journey, experiences. These performances inspire and tend to express human emotions through the use of body movements, the voice of visuals, the sound collages.

The reason to choose a performing art piece is that compared to visual artwork (as in most artwork that only can be visually viewed), a performance needs to consider a lot more to be able to complete a stage, some of the factors could be controlled and some couldn’t. The unreplicable experience of viewing a performance completes the art itself, it’s different from watching a record or movie over and over again, or even watching the same performance again, but an experience which only happens once a lifetime makes it unique for me.

#Lecture 6

Zao Wou-ki 趙無極

https://www.sothebys.com/en/artists/wou-ki-zao#past-lots

Zao Wou-ki 趙無極 (1920-2013)

Not too deep into expressionism, but one artist I would like to talk about is Zao Wou-ki, a Chinese oil painter who moved to France. He combined Western abstract painting methods with the ethereal imagery of Chinese freehand brushwork (寫意畫), the oil painting is transformed into a freehand brushwork effect, with thin oil splashes and dry brushwork.

In Chinese 寫意 mean writing ideas / concepts, this is well connected with expressionism themes which “ refers to art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas.” (TATE)

I love the use of colour, free brushwork techniques combined with layering in oil painting. It’s pretty difficult to define or explain the concept of the artwork, but his work expresses a very strong emotional sense. Some of the artwork triggers a memory, or calls out certain emotions I've experienced.

#Lecture 5

Shepherdess and Her Flock

https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103QVR

Shepherdess and Her Flock, Jean-Francois Millet, Apox. 1864-1865.

Before Aristotle’s theory, "art imitates nature" was widely admired by artists, therefore realism and naturalism are mainstream in the art industry. While Aristotle believes that the content of art shouldn’t be limited to the frame of imitating nature, but also “man in action” - what happens, what you do, how you live - which is mainly derived from Greek tragedy and the influence of Homer's epics. As mentioned in the lecture, he also believes that mimesis should go beyond its original and states that art was built based on reality, but sublimes to a higher level.

Jean-Francois Millet is famous for being a realism painter, his artwork mainly focused on depicting the labour and life of farmers, with a strong rural life flavour.

Millet illustrates a village shepherdess, standing in the wilderness of the grassland, silently praying to God for a day of peaceful life. Beauty lies not in what the picture depicts, but in the artist's emotional reflection of what he sees. This painting embodies Miller's love and gratitude for nature.

The painter faithfully depicts the labourers, flocks, star-spotted villages, and sunshine on the earth. Miller has a deep affection for rural life, because he lives in this land, getting up early and returning late. Miller in life must be pious, full of expectations and yearning for life, so the peasant image shown in Miller's paintings is always full of simplicity and kindness.

Millet’s work both re-presenting nature and man in action, which evolves from pure imitation to express his beliefs in his paintings.

#Lecture 4

Babel

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/meireles-babel-t14041

Babel, by Clido Meireles, 2001.

The artist was inspired by the tower of Babel from the bible. It combined the ideas of human society’s system, rules and codes (language). From code, recognitions and common sense shift towards the ‘breakage’ of the codes, as mentioned in the lecture, this artwork is attached to the concept of multiplicity (of voices), conflicts between races or generations, and the divorce of physical reality.

It demonstrates the complex diversity of human races, providing a sensational experience viewing the installation in real life; the design of different muti-radio in layers all from different times compresses the universal context that humans will always have diversity. The height of the tower was seemingly accessible but out of reach, for me, it’s a metaphor for unbreakable glass walls between people.

#Lecture 3

Red String

https://www.yoshikatsufujii.com/red-string-book

Red String, by Yoshikatsu Fujii, 2014.

Aside from the inspiration of my personal practice as a photobook series, the signs and symbol aspect is the heart of this artwork. The red string is a metaphor for the fate of love in Chinese or related culture, while traditional symbols were told and educated through time.

According to Taiwanese folklore, the god of love, marriage and destiny in Chinese culture will make a roster of unmarried adults in the world and report it to the heavenly court. After the god receives the roster in the next month, he will copy it into a roster of spouses according to their personality, good and evil, interests and conditions, and then bind the feet/finger of both people with red threads, so that suitable people can be matched as a couple.

Humans tend to give things a defined meaning so everything could be explained as signs and symbols, sometimes made me think, could this be defined as a kind of arrogance, a sense of control or just the instincts of the top intelligent creature on the food chain?

#Lecture 2

Creation of Adam

https://www.michelangelo.net/creation-of-adam/

Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 1511-1512.

This expresses the value of a traditional painting, connecting it with art history; while artists recreating from stories (in this case bible stories) they wanted to pass down the moral lesson through the artwork. Whether we know the original story or not, when we view the artwork we are reading the artist’s interpretation of the original, and the meaning behind the originals.

My mother used to hang a copy of God creating Adam in our old house, as one of my earliest childhood memories, it made me explore deeper into traditional art, but it still influences me as an artist and I believe art should be balanced between connoisseurship, meaning and experimentation.

#Lecture 1

Week 7 - Katrina Sluis

In week 7 lecture, we have Katrina Sluis as our guest, she talked through the path and influence due to the evolution of digital technology since 1990 and how did these impact our lifestyle in both contemporary and photography interior. Sluis research and explore the core of photography had being changed a lot since the release of digital manipulation such as Adobe photoshop, the ‘realness’ of photography has being challenged; the easy access of camera creates a new trend of sharing them on the internet and social media creates overwhelmed amount of photograph produced and shared on web; the invention of AI and non-human photography flip a new page of the new digital world.

Sluis’ recent project “All I know is what’s on the internet” (2018) explores the new culture of sharing photographs on the web and social media. The relationship between humans has changed a lot for the past 10 years, discussing the benefit of improvement of technology but also the misuse of these technologies.

The installation of the phone click farm amazes me the most cause it used the ironic way to express the information and comments flood especially on the internet, in our generation it’s hard to not use social media to contact with people which leads to the privacy issue and seeking compliments for vanity, the over focus on social media leads to problems of real life communication. The flipping and AI bot represent how we get controlled by the phone and let us act like a robot which is smart to display both visually and meaningfully.

I also enjoyed the discussion about the usage and copyright problem created by non-human photography and AI. There's an unsolved problem: how can we define in the near future the moral crisis while collecting data to feed the AI to do things, such as face recognition, create non-existent human faces. How does the copyright belong to while AI learns a new skill through a huge amount of database which the copyright owns by many different people? There may never a solution but I’m interested to see if the post-human ideas would ever comes to real.

Week 6 - Emma Phillips

In week 6 lecture we had Emma Phillips as our guest with her early experience of study at art school, and the use of film cameras leads her to the path of analogue photography. The early inspiration of taking portraiture in her hometown pushed her further to the recent ideas of taking photos in the personal space of people’s everyday life which explore the boundary of privacy and the human’s nature of curiosity with other people’s life, which also become a sense of documentary photography as a record of the contemporary Australian lifestyle.

Phillips talked about a few photographer’s influences such as William Eggleston, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans how they influenced her in arthritic and photographer style, and helped her go through the path of experiments for creating her own personal style. Phillips also mentioned that she was a big reader, and the idea of ‘Use photography as writing text with the way like fiction and tell the story’ can be seen through her work.

Her photograph telling the context in more fiction way, but personally I think it’s often out of context but more descriptive like texts, the snapshot-liked idea she mentioned blurred the boundary of documentary photography and lifestyle photography, the action for asking people to entering their house itself kinda a fuzzy zone due the characteristic of documentary with ‘document in original form’, even the subject allows the photographer to take photograph, the self conscious of the subject may influence the result of being ‘original and real’ as in the one of the most important identity in documentary photography.

So overall Phillips’ work kind of giving me the sense of imitate documentary photography in sense of style and aesthetic (use of direct flash, black and white medium format camera, etc), but sometimes indirect to the topics if you compare them with other life-style documentary photographers such as Nan Goldin or street documentary photographer, they do expressing strong style or topic but more importantly the main topic/focus clear to shown, which I personally can’t see in a lot of Phillips’ photographic artwork.

Week 5 - Lucas Davidson

For week 5 lecture we had Lucas Davidson as guest to share his inspiration from the memories with water. The use of digital photo media in various platforms allows him to challenge the tradition of photography art: the sculpture form of photography, the incomplete elements of pure photography, instead of recording the time at the moment, Davidson prefers to mark the time; which photography not as a fixed object but creating motion through his work to form the sense of connection between body and feeling. Davidson shows this through his latest exhibition “LIVING WITH UNCERTAINTY” (2020) which intends to create a new experience in optical, sensorial and perceiving for the audience, it intends to disrupt traditional viewing experience and let the audience question what the exhibition was about. The exhibition used solid objects to display the state of flow, the reflection between the installation manipulated the reflection between light to create the sense of body in between and flow, also the use of a special interface with sonar and mark to present moment as a mark into time and space. This series which interests me is that the use of solid objects as a choice to present water is not as often seen in water installation art, this also applies to his own work “Double Scope Integration” (2018). We’ve often seen the use of projection or illusion, even involve the real water in the space to create that ‘watery’ visual elements like Elizabeth Ogilvie’s “The liquid room” (2002) and “Bodies of water” (2006), or even the use of reflection such as “Water in a Bubble” by Shigeko Hirakawa (2016). While the audience is walking through and around the installation it may create the feeling that you are ‘swimming’ between these solid objects. Personally I like his idea for being playful and creative with traditional ideas, then break through the old form to create new art.

Week 4 - Gerwyn Davies

In week 4 lecture, Gerwyn Davies explored his series of his self-performed type of artwork, the journey, and the influence of “camp” as in both aesthetics and definitions of exaggeration of display, and homosecxual (male) way. In his work I can see the traits of deconstruction, surrealism, minimalism and hyper-reality.

Davis' costumes in the photograph were mostly made by himself, and highly influenced by his fashion, he mainly focused on the culture, irony and representation, queers and bodybuilding - the performative elements of “camp”, which inspected in appearance but also disappearance due to the underlying identity behind the costume.

Production wise is very inspiring, most of the work was done in the studio, with the controlled material and posing, but there is no set formula for production due to the uncontrollable factors, which is doable for personal projects, and similar ideas also can be applied to non-human models, also the advertising-like style tells the message with simple elements.

The self-identification as mentioned a bit above, it has been asked if the tattoos were one of the elements of the photograph, in my personal understanding Davis does not see the tattoo as an element, but the tattoo is a kind of identification for the viewer, especially the only body parts shown is only his limbs. The exaggeration of poses disidentified the model's identity because the poses between photos and photos do not relate, it’s more based on the setup he created, so the viewer wouldn’t see it as a connection for the model; as an example the series ‘DELUXE’.

I like his work using humorous and exaggeration ways to express his ideas and political aspects, with simple setups but allowing viewers to have their own understanding and imagnations of the photo; aesthetically wise the use of colour and juxtaposition of the elements feels neat and comfortable, willing to see more of his future artwork.

Week 3 - Salote Tawale

In week 3 lecture, Salote Tawale explored the idea mainly focused on her self-identification between gender, race, nationality, ethnicity and social classes. She used the term “decolonization” to unpack the idea with her insecure as an outsider, and also express the feeling of dislocation between two different cultures; Tawale often used post photography methods and a lot of technology to challenge traditional definition of photography.

These idea can be seen from her early short video work for RMIT graduation, when she chosen filming ‘herself’ as the way of presentation, for me it kind of shows the insufficient in confidence for her identity: Pacific islander background, female, lower social class, maybe not mainstream western beauty standard body, leads her desire and execute to “perform” and showing the authority of control her own body, to breakthrough the traditional western white gaze and lenses.

Throughout the time, Tawale works moving towards the direction of sharing personal and cultural background, the conflicts between two cultures, which Tawale describes as “double colonization”, the struggle of metal feeling about being a half outsider in this country which resonate to my personal experience as immigration. As an example of work ‘Sometimes you make me nervous…’ (2015) and ‘Burebasaga Marama's’ (2017-18) have shown both of the elements as mentioned above.

While she focuses more of her work on the Fiji community, there're a few cooperative performances such as dancing with students and collaboration with professional dancers were both good examples of combining traditional culture with another platform to display.

Overall personally, I respect the concept of expressing the complex as a common Australia migration also as multi-identity struggles, but Tawale’s artwork often hard to understand it’s context without a lot of background information; for me it’s quite hard to read the visual messages throughout the work either her videography or photography work.

Week 2 - Samuel Hodge

In week 2 lecture, Samuel Hodge explained his ideas and inspirations mainly for his exhibition ongoing at UNSW called ‘The Wit of the Staircase’ (2020). The exhibition draws a collection of his past 20 year work in artistic practice, which includes multi-device of displaytion to provide the audience a different sense of experience during the visit; the set up also contain his idea of leaving the dust/fingerprint/ footprint on the artwork maintain the status and path of how the artwork has been handled.

Hodge’s core idea for this exhibition is to present how the old work can be reused and recreated into a new form; even the failed project has given opportunity to remake reborn to reform new meanings. During the process of reviewing through old work, it allows him to discover the uncertainty, unexpectation, and breaking the restriction of the art itself.

The ‘Untitled connection video’ represent the desire of connections for Hodge to connect with strangers, including the audiences, the setup was intended to make audience unsure about how to interact with the artwork, so it creates a new queer through this process, it create another layer of meaning for it.

By judging the idea of ‘The Wit of the Staircase’, the montage itself was quite messy, even though the individual photo have it’s own meaning, and it also includes the meaning of his past career experiences, but does the choice of selection itself contains other meanings instead of everyday life and work? Or does the montage represent “Samuel Hodge” as a whole?

Overall I like the idea of re-creation, by reviewing past work there’re maybe spotlight we didn’t mention at the moment of time while creating the work, also throughout the time we as artist/human the build up of life experiences provide new sights and lense to give these artwork new life.

Week 1 - Yvette Hamilton

In first week lecture, Yvette Hamilton explains her inspiration and ideas for her artwork since analog photography towards post photography, she experimented with a combination of both of the techniques, especially with the evolving technology allowing her to explore new platforms and challenge the form of traditional photography.

Hamilton starts from the blackhole photograph which links to the idea of non-human photography, the interaction between human and camera, exploring what can be defined as camera and the definition of “portraiture”; which leads to the idea of interactional work with the audience such as ‘Are you there’ (2014) and ‘Where are you’ (2015) to ‘Moving Portrait’ (2016). These works demonstrate the concept of redefining the meaning of portrait, questioning the traditional stereotype of thinking portraits must be recorded in the platform of painting or photographs, this also shown in her early work You are here by asking the question toward the audience: can a mirror reflection become a form of portraiture?

Which I found personally very interested in this overall concept, because the whole idea of what can be defined as portraiture is a very interesting concept to dig in, the use of mirror and interactive device investigates the relationship between human and spaces, the philosophy of who we are as “being” and “presence” is this universe, why the portrait must be a record of existence? We as humans always pursue frozen moments as infinity, but according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle the status of the object has changed when the photograph has been taken, so by using the mirror it maintains the ongoing status of the object, and more as a true reflection of our appearance at that moment.

Although the concept is very interesting, there's still technical defects about the devices, for example in ‘Are you there’ the mirror’s AI seems not very smart, so less possible reaction from the viewer.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Nameless