Inspiration: I am fascinated by structural beauty and eastern culture. My family is a traditional Chinese family that instilled in me an early passion for porcelain, pottery, zisha, and other Chinese-crafted artworks, including hand fans. I wanted to demonstrate some eastern aesthetics with machinery after I accessed PCOMP.

The current design: A work on eastern aesthetics that uses servos to portray the structural elegance of the fan. The viewer interacts with the installation through the gesture sensor, and the hand swipes left and right across the sensor to control the hand fan’s opening and shutting, the action is a little like Taichi, a Chinese martial art performance.

User experience Problem: How to guide people to swipe their hands without any text and description. How to achieve the interaction through some icons or signals? 

sketch

Folding Fan  Anatomy of Fan

About the fan： I want the piece to be able to speak across Eastern and Western cultures in both directions. While bringing Eastern aesthetics to Western culture, it also provides the viewer from the East with more possibilities in Eastern aesthetics. The art is intended to break away from a stereotypical image of eastern culture, hence the choice of material for the hand fans is critical.

Throughout Chinese history there have been many Chinese fans, usually classified into folding fans and regimental fans. There was also a fan, where separate sticks were fastened together at one end like the folding fan, but they did not use fabric or leather.

There are two types of traditional Chinese folding fans, the fire painting fan and the Sandalwood fan, which display scenes of landscapes or stories on the fan sticks through painting or carving techniques.

Fire Painting Fan Sandalwood Fan 

Most traditional Chinese artworks are figurative, but I am personally fascinated by abstract expression. So I wanted to make the hand fans show a certain scene or just a feeling in a relatively abstract way through materials and colors. However, the hand fans itself is a particularly figurative existence, so I thought of using light to get the shadow of the fan on the wall, so that the visual experience may be more abstract but also more intense. At this time, I thought that I could use transparent material to make the fan so that the shadow effect could achieve flow and permeability similar to that of a lake, water, or pond. It’s like a glass material, but of course, I can’t use glass to make hand fans.

In the transparent material, I can find the easiest thing to use acrylic, but I tried to play the light through the acrylic on the wall, and did not have the effect I wanted, only a silhouette, no sense of transparency. Then I found uv resin, many people use it to make jewelry, I found a picture of a bookmark made with uv resin, the shadow through the sun on the wall is the effect I want. So I’m going to make the hand fans with uv resin.

Moreover…

There was another type of folding fan named the cockade fan, which was made at the end of the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. The cockade fan was an ivory carved figure story fan, and it could be unfolded in all 360 degrees, later spread to the West and became a “cockade fan” in the old collections of European royalty. If the previous plan works well and I have extra time, I can also add the fan that unfolded 360 degrees.