2020 IB Visual Art Exhibition

An example of such a student is Tiger, a graduate from the 2020 cohort. Next year, he plans to attend Parsons, The New School – a renowned art and design college in New York. When Tiger originally entered the Primary School he already had a keen passion for processing ideas visually. Dr. Tai, who taught Tiger as a young student, explains, “You work with a student like this and you know that one day he is going to do extraordinary and interesting things. Your job is just to not quash his passion and to hopefully inspire him to find ways to grow it.” However, success stretches beyond simple skill and talent, and one of the most important aspects of the Pao School experience is the concept of whole person education. A student’s development as a ‘whole person of character’ is essential, and the school works hard to respect and nurture each child as a unique individual.  Dr Tai emphasizes this,  “Our students are excelling and are going to make amazing contributions because they are also kind, thoughtful, and interesting people.”

Above the Clouds

My overarching theme is ‘discovery’, first through imagination and then in the search for beauty in daily routines. Starting my journey of artmaking by expressing fantastical scenes from my wild imagination, I gradually learned to see the beauty in common things.

I used to believe that art is meant to be about showing people extraordinary scenes that one can’t find in real life. I was greatly inspired and influenced by the Japanese animator Satoshi Kon, who succeeded in visualizing his incredible imaginings. This led to my preference of using symbolization as a device when portraying abstract emotions or expressing products of my imagination, as evident in Addicted, Crush etc. My sculpture Man-eating was based on images in my imagination inspired by Luxun’s writing.

However, I gradually began to realize that although art is often said to be higher than life, it was based on the reality of life first of all. I began to look for the hidden beauty in daily life, and so my work became more real-life based, such as in February Corners and Sycamore Trees.

February Corners

Sycamore Trees

Growth

The overarching theme of my exhibition is a journal of me. It is not only a record of my trips and journeys, but also a collection documenting my growth and memory. The final pieces show my thinking, experience, and recollection of me. My work is separated into three parts; the memory of childhood, documenting my travels, and the experience of everyday life as a young adult in China.

Prayer flags, Qinghai-Tibet Railway and Monk are three artworks that document the scenery in Tibet. They are my journal of the journeys I have taken. I want to show Tibet’s special religious culture, the surrounding mountains and the beauty of mother nature to the audience. In Prayer Flags, bright colors help to emphasize the flags – highlighting the religious culture – and loose mark-making helps to communicate the movement of them fluttering in the windy landscape. I applied Jenny Saville’s loose painting technique to the flags and these big colour blocks made the flags eye-catching. Also, in the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, I used a technique inspired by Nobuhiro Nakanishi and physically layered boards to create depth in the scenery. Monk is a Lino cutting piece, inspired by my interest in traditional printmaking. The black and white color of printmaking gives a solemn atmosphere which made my piece look serious. 

Childhood in Disney

The inspiration for my artworks include interaction with people, alongside my life and memories as a Chinese student. My artworks are linked to these topics because they reveal the way I see the world and things that I am interested in. To explore these themes, I reflected on myself and society by observation and experiences. I started my first piece by capturing my surrounding environment – Shanghai. When I was walking on the street in Shanghai’s city center, I can feel the busyness and the vigor of people on the street, so I believe people are the ones that makes this place fantastic and makes me want to record these moments. To narrow down and make my theme more personal, I focused on the connection between people and food, as food is an essential part of the Chinese culture, and I love it.

I explored the themes of busyness, food and Chinese culture through different media. Moreover, I created works inspired by my private, personal memories, and items, to show my identity and my life experiences. The busyness can be seen in Landscape – Light and Reflection as well as City. The subject of food is explored in Food Photography and Overfilled Food Collection as well as playing a major part in City. 

City

Rain

The overarching theme of my exhibition is “Phenomenon”. Both natural and social phenomena are explored in my artworks, bringing visual representations of different phenomena in my life to the viewers. The works illustrate my life experiences and various emotions: enlightenment, depression, nostalgia, isolation, frustration, memory, etc. Put together, the works record different moments of my life and I would like to share some of the experiences with viewers.

All of my works are based on my experiences and developed into a visual representation of my interpretation of a phenomenon. For example, the work Self-portrait depicts my mental state during my last year of high school. In the painting, my face is covered with cling film, which visualizes the suffocating peer pressure. I also like to place the subjects of depiction in absurd scenes to obscure and exaggerate the emotion of my works. In the installation Manmade Amber, I conceptualized my memory of a friend, who left the school, into an artwork. I put my drawings of her face into glass containers to symbolize the concept of memory. The memories of her are fading in my mind, so I want to seal the memories in containers. This method of preserving memory is similar to the natural phenomenon of how tree amber can capture insects and remnants of the past, so I named this installation Manmade Amber.

Another work in my exhibition, Fragments of Life, is made to document my daily life of isolation during the pandemic of coronavirus, which is a global “phenomenon”.