Yanlin Zhu, “WorkingPalace”
Brief View of the Work:
Yanlin Zhu, WorkingPalace, 2022
Description:
In this project, I try to recreate the depressive feeling people feel in their everyday life. The subject of the first photo is an office building.
I want to create a sense of contradiction by decolorizing most of the parts of the building and leaving out the highly saturated orange lights provided by the light from people working inside. Through highlighting the sharp contrast between colors and grayscale, I intend to highlight the contrast between the liveliness of human beings and the dullness of work. To push the connotation of the work further, the contrast could be considered as a criticism against the alienation of labor from capitalism: the black and white blocks from the windows of the building suggest the monotonicity in the working place, and the scattering lights suggest the remaining humanity in this boredom from a capitalistic way of production. Also, in the stagnant composition, my intention is to create an out-of-breath feeling from the depressive working place.
The second piece, it is a collage of different buildings and objects inside them: other working places, working places under construction, corridors, escalators, windows, and most importantly, a desperate figure of a human being. For the colors, I referenced Piet Mondrian’s works. (See Fig.3)
I appropriated his ideas of abstracting buildings into different blocks from a birds-eye-view and utilising colors to create a sense of differentiation. However, I altered his way of only using vertical black lines. In fact, in my composition, there are only declining lines. I used this gesture to create a spiral feeling in the middle and create a relative visual focus. Also, through this attempt, I want to depict the instability of the seemingly stable office building presented in figure 1, and further illustrate the rooted instability of the capitalist society. Moreover, I use highly saturated colors to mask the different objects. I want to represent the scene that people in the orange windows from figure 1 see: the palace-like objects covered by vivid colors, but they are nothing more than pure dullness of black and white. What makes the picture more ironic is that the human in the orange light is originally a photo of a commercial advertisement rather than a photo of a genuine person (see fig.4)
Therefore, through juxtaposing these two figures, I want to create a variety of contradictions: between colors, between compositions, between inside and outside, between dullness and excitement, and most importantly, between subjects and objects.
Process:
For the photo one, here’s one of the numerous photos I took:
In order to make the composition looks full and depressive, I zoomed in for more details, and here’s another photo I’ve taken.
For the collage work, I twisted the pictures to fit them into the frames, and masked them with color blocks. Here’s one of the color block attempts. You can see the editing process from my psd file.
Conclusion:
If I had more time, I would definitely try a composition that follows the original Piet Mondrian. Here’s a great example provided by Professor Wuwei during our discussion(see below).
Past Drafts:
Draft on Oct.28, 2022
This one appears to be too dark for a printed version, so I lighted it up in the final work.
Possible Concepts:
The unphotoshopped one is the studio shot of a cotton swab, the photoshopped one is the collage of wide-open mouths.
The color difference might provide a visual shock. For example, the black background and the white swab and the colorful (maybe appropriating some of the Andy Warhol ideas here, see below) portraits.
The main concept is to use the color difference between the dull PCR test cotton swab and the vivid portrait of regular people to show the sharp contract. If possible, I want the work can be interpreted as a criticism of the current Chinese Covid policy.
Another idea is to use geometrical blocks in skyscrapers (see below) juxtaposed with color blocks (with contradicting colors, highly saturated).
To highlight the contradiction between the dull industrial products and the vivid lives that reside inside.
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