Concept
Before starting the project, I went out for several exhibitions in the city for inspiration. And in this exhibition organized by OCAT Shanghai named In Solidarity with______, I found a display room, in the middle of which set two chairs, with a screen in the front showing a video in a gray tone. Plain as the layout was, it caught my eye in a second. All seemed in their place. Calm and balanced. It left much space for immersion in the zone and imagination for what happens beyond the present.
The scene drove me to create something different, vibrant, and intriguing to break the serenity and balance that I would capture through the lens.
For the diptych, since what first came to my mind was to break the present relationship between the objects in the frame, and the chairs would be the main subjects in the first image, I decided to empower the screen in my photoshopped image, thus transferring the focus from the bottom to the top of the picture.
After brainstorming a few possible ideas, here is my basic concept: The still-life set-up portrays the traditional relationship between the media as an information provider and people as receivers. While several changes would be made to the photoshopped image. First of all, the chairs will be broken into pieces and piled up on the ground. The screen will be torn in the middle, with a hole filled with bright and dizzy images, meaning that people are no longer mere audiences and start to immerse themselves in interactive media. It can be interpreted in either a good or a bad way as media always have both sides.
Process
· My process in staging and photographing part I image:
Since the display room that I was shooting was quite dark, I increased the parameter of ISO and adjusted the aperture. To create a sense of serenity, I placed the chairs straightly in front of the screen. By standing in the back of the room, I tried to make a triangle composition so that there was a balance on the canvas.
· My digital process in creating part II image:
As I wanted to focus on the brightness of the posters, I decided to give the whole image a cold tone by adjusting the color to a bluer state. For the chairs, initially, I planned to break the chairs into pieces, which ended up looking unnatural. So I tried adjusting the filling and transparency of each chair so that some looked stuffed and heavy while some looked more empty, thus creating a feeling that the chairs were more or less destroyed in some way. After piling them up in the bottom middle, I started working on the screen. (the process will be covered in the coming paragraph)
· The most significant step
The most significant step was the “hole-digging” in the middle of the screen. At first, as I had no idea how to 
create a torn-up visual effect, I turned to Ian for help. He suggested that I could do the tearing myself on a piece of paper, take a photo of it, and integrate it into the photoshopped image by using the mask and other tools.
That solved my problem well, and the DIY process was fun. After which I just filled the hole with posters that I shot in exhibitions and adjusted their colors to a brighter level. When I talked with Inmi about my photoshopped image, she felt that the posters were in fact like they were blocking the hole. Hence, I made them more three-dimensional by adjusting the transparency and sizes of each as well as adding luminous circles and dots. Thanks to Inmi’s advice, now it more looks like there’s a wide space behind the hole.
Conclusion
If given more time, I would do more experiments on the project. For starters, I would probably reconsider the number of chairs in my photographed picture because it causes confusion when people try to interpret the two chairs in the picture. They may wonder about the relationship between the two and ask questions like are there two people who have left? Is there a story between them? And I would place the chairs in different ways and shoot them from different angles to see if there can be other possibilities.
For the photoshopped image, instead of using rays of light, I might try other ways to connect the screen and the broken chairs in piles to improve the overall composition.
