GE1401Assignment3 Causal Analysis --My One Piece fever

Think of a problem. It doesn't have to be a major, earth-shattering problem like the dwindling ozone layer or inequality of the sexes. It can be a common problem in your everyday life.

I have been incurably obsessed with One Piece, which is a super famous Japanese comic authored by Oda Eiichiro, since I was 12. It is an adventure story of Luffy, who is the captan of a pirate team named ‘The Straw Hat’, and his company traveling from island to island, helping people to solve problems, fighting against evil spirits and competing with other pirates in order to get the highest price—One Piece. To be frank, I own a whole set of One Piece manga as well as a great quantity of its figures and its related products. My family has never understood why I am so crazy about it. “Girl’s not supposed to read teenage boy manga and more importantly you’ve grown up so you shouldn’t be too childish!” my mum claimed. Some of my friends are also curious of why a quiet and shy girl like me would be attracted by a violent story. May be it is because of its straightforward style and pure spirit of characters which are really different from my reality.

 One Piece lives up to the slogan of ShonenJump, the best-selling Japanese manga magazine, as friendship, striving and victory. It is a typical ‘hot blood’ story that is appealing to me. Every time when Luffy encountered difficulties, he would never give up and burn his life for achieving the goal. Also his friends would try their best to help him for nothing repaid. In the chapter of Alabasta, they made the maximum effort to aid princess Vivi in conducting the revolution of her country and to save people from the violent domination by a criminal organization. Their struggling processes are extremely encouraging that I truly appreciate. Somehow it gave me the energy to pass through many uneasy situations such as the endless examinations and the assignment pressure.  

The innocent friendship between the main characters is definitely the most catching element of the story. Every member of the Straw Hat was not joining the group for no reason. Luffy offered the biggest helping hands to his dear friends whenever they needed. Helping Nami to defeat and expel the ruffian Arlong is one of the typical examples. There is a spiritual connection among the company so that they would never betray each other. They are united as one because everyone is willing to devote themselves to the committed friends. They also persistently shared the constant and consistent goal—the One piece. The passions they have is actually lighting up my boring routine. Perhaps this kind of relationship is exactly the thing that I desire but it is difficult to be achieved in real life.

The beautiful and vivid drawing style together with the well-designed setting of each island and characters make up a wonderful fantasy One Piece world that contrasts with our dull concrete jungle. It is a direct and simple world that the boundary of black and white is clear. I enjoy following the characters to chase the big dream with the profound friendship and seeing the wicked guys to be punished by justice.

The answer of why I love One Piece so much is quite obvious now. People, who are living in the reality, are lacking in the pure depicted in the fancy world. The competitiveness is keep increasing in different ages, careers, business, and even countries in my living place. In such a cruel world, it is hard to let people trust the others without hesitate. One Piece is like the Utopia amid the concrete world and like a medicine for healing readers’ wounded minds. You may think that I am escaping from the reality and letting myself to immerse in the illusion. One Piece is, in fact, a reflection of what I really want in my sub-consciousness. It is the representation of the deep desire of pure love and relationship among people.

GE1401 Assessment2 Descriptive Writing-- My Mother

My mother is 50 years old now. She has short and dyed-black hair. Her oval-shaped face looks pale and yellow, which is covered with obvious freckles as if hundreds of ants are crossing her face as well as shallow wrinkles that mainly spread near the outer corners of her eyes. She is also got a pair of small eyes and thin lips. She is just like a typical Chinese housewife we usually see in market. However, she had a pretty good looking in her early ages. She had light and soft complexion and her cheeks were ruddy. She was wearing perfect make-up on her face all the time. Her elegant smiley almond eyes made she looked like a classical Chinese beauty walking out from a traditional Chinese female figure painting.

As years passed by, she is getting gaunter and gaunter. Sometimes she seems to be exhausted. She claimed that she was okay as she had been used to working hard since she started to work as a little former when she was 6. Anyway, she collapsed once recently because of serious headache that caused by high blood pressure.

“I’m going to die because you guys piss me off all the time!” she grumbled at me and my siblings, “I won’t live long.” She often says something like that.

She seems to blame us that we are burdens to her but actually we know she loves us more than herself. Even if she is tired of being a worker and housewife at the same time, she still wakes up early in every morning before our alarm clocks ring and insists to prepare a hot and fresh breakfast for us. Struggling with her sore waist and aching back, she just takes a deep breath, swallows all the pain and pretends she is able to support the crushing sky.

Due to the difficult time of bringing up three children, especially we had ever lived in poverty when I was a kid, she tends to have a quite strong expectation of seeing us to became ‘dragon’ in the future, which turns she to be so-called ‘tiger mum’. This is also very much affected by her realism.

“You will be a sweeper if you don’t work hard now!” she frowned and said.

She has kept threatening us about how bad our future will be in case of not getting good academic results. Every time she wants us to listen to her words so desperately, she must shout at us loudly and we can see her face growing to be red and as fierce as roaring lion. I guess this is the major reason why she got high blood pressure. The others may think that she is having a bad temper, yet we all know that her fury is just one way of expressing her love.

When I was young, I used to believe mum was so tall and big. Two decades lapsed, I have discovered that she is so small and fragile, but her instinct of protecting her babies drove her to be strong and undefeatable. I think it is time for me to make her a better life.

Words counted: 524

GE1113~My self-portrait!!! XDXD

Let's see what I ve drawn! It's a just a pencil sketching which referred to one of my self-snapshots.
It looks really strange...isn't it? I feel sorry that I 've deleted the orginal photo thus I am unable to show the comparison of the photo and drawing.

 

In the week 3 tutorial, we were told to draw the "Mona Lisa" in reversed form which aslo referred to a reversed Mona Lisa black&white copy. It is actually testing us about the inpretation of the shape of image and the class drawing will be used for comparing with our self-portraits in order to define the difference of them.

 



GE1401--Reflective Writing "Why I don't write"

Why I don’t write

 

In secondary school teachers always said content must be the priority in whatever article we want to write. I totally agree with this saying. Writing is the most direct way to express abstract thoughts and concepts. I am happy to share them with the others through writing but there are many restrictions that disturb me from writing freely.

 

When we appreciate a painting, we may say that how it presents the “mood” of the whole picture is essential but the aesthetic evaluation is also an important issue for judging whether it is good. Writing is in the same situation. A beautiful essay should be both spiritually and technically beautiful. So called technique is known as grammar and vocabulary which are exactly my weakness. Incorrect use of writing techniques will cause the improper presentation of ideas that making me refuses to write too much.

 

Apart from the technical aspect, limited theme and format of writing is the bigger reason of why I resist to write. I, as a student, have no right to choose what I really want to write in school essay. We are usually given a topic and then do our job in a very limited time and words, as well as the format to be applied. Moreover, we also have to participate in role playing game too. Many topics are like this: Pretend it is twenty years from now and you are a famous writer. Write an essay like George Orwell's entitled ' why I write’. How do I act as a famous writer but my writing sucks indeed?

 

Still, I understand it is reasonable for student to follow the rules so that we can learn things more efficiently. Now I suppose the topic of writing is just my cup of tea and I am willing to do my best to make improvement on my grammatical problems. Nevertheless, I have to decide what is suitable to be written down on paper. Suitable contents are favorable to majority, school or even the government so you are able to receive a higher score, or else you may lose your way in jail as if Liu Xiao Bo, who wrote an ‘unsuitable’ essay which angered the Chinese official. It is better to give up writing instead of telling lies.

Word Count: 382

Mak Yi Fong

Contemporary & New Media Art project, A day dream in the study room

Group Member: Mak & Angel

 

Idea/ Concept of this project:

Originally, we attempted to create a reversed space of a living room. We were thinking to create a space that only exists in our dream but somehow related to the reality. We want to create an environment that everyone who gets into the space would feel that they are just having a day dream in a familiar place. Here are some of the basic models that we used SIMS 3 to design the setting of the room. Originally, we intended to turn all the things upside down to create a reversed space effect.

Nevertheless, we had limited resources and felt stressful from the exams and projects, a new idea popped in our minds. Therefore, the scene was set to be a study room which was relatively smaller than the original living room. It is still a space full of imagination and impossibility like what we had decided before. Everything there is motionless in which things seem to be floating in the universe. We did not apply too many elements in the study as it would disorder and make the spaced confusing. To some extent, it is like all the things being stopped in an instant. All the things floating in the mid air are as common as we can see in normal study room such as chairs, books and clocks. The chairs and books have the symbolic meaning of study and the clocks represent time. Also, butterflies are everywhere on the books, chairs and clocks. In Chinese philosophy, butterfly actually presents the idea of illusion, which means we immerse in a dream, a fantasy world. It is like we have just fallen asleep while we are working very hard in doing our jobs.

Inspirations:

l Surrealism:

http://makyifong.blogspot.hk/2012/10/surrealism-is-movement-began-in-early.html#!/2012/10/surrealism-is-movement-began-in-early.htm

l   The Art of Sculpture

http://theartofsculpture.tumblr.com/post/30944077085/leyla-cardenas-colombian-b-entre-piso-y-techo

l   The D.C Docent

http://dcdocent.tumblr.com/post/33649978523/eye-candy-monday-thrown-to-the-wind-by


Design drafts of the furniture and the room

 

Materials:

We intended to create a room by foam boards or wooden boards by ourselves at first. A small room can construct a narrow environment that has greater sense of pressure to the audience. But we finally turned to use a sidecar from the garage of Angel’s Daddy. Thanks to the luck, we had a chance to make our artwork in a real room and enjoy the process of turning a mess into a well decorated room step by step. This is our very first time to decorate a sidecar. Hence, we regard this as a kind of performance or experiment, but not just making an artwork. Sidecar has greater space for our creation and imagination. Also for the convenience of creating, sidecar has sufficient space for us to move and stay.

 

Materials used

Let's see our process of making the artwork!

This is how the sidecar originally looked like.

 

This is the environment that we had been working in.

 

We had to clean up the sidecar first such as tearing down some useless and disturbing attachment of the sidecar. Of course we have received helping hands from Angel’s dad and a nice uncle in the garage.

 

We attempted to use foam boards to cover the windows.

 

 

 

We decided to use metal boards for sealing the windows instead of using the foam boards because we got the helps from uncles again. Thus, we could save the foam boards and the budget of buying new foam boards for making furniture. By the way, we needed to hand make the chairs therefore newspaper and foam boards were our main materials.

We used wooden boards for the sealing of windows on another side.

We also used newspapers to cover the wall as we needed to spray paint on it.

 

 

 

We began to make the furniture.

I am designing the details of the objects we need.

 

Our first product~ haha, a little bit ugly!

 

 

This is our third chair!

 

Cutting butterflies from color papers:

 

 

For the consistency of the whole space, the ceiling was covered by a dark blue cloth.

We also borrow some materials for example, paints, iron boards, canvas and some other useful tools

 

Darker blue canvas and paint in the wall are to represent the night-time’s environment.

We started to spray paint on the wall. As we had no experience in spraying the paint, we were persuaded not to spraying on our own. Thanks uncle Ho!

 

Then, the floor was covered by lighter blue canvas which represent daytime’s sky.

 

Done!! The basic decoration of the interior was completed. With ‘blue sky’ on the floor, we had created an effect of reversed space. We also brought two skies coming from different time coexist in one space.

 

Here are the artifacts that we had made.

We were doing the preparation for hanging the stuff. We strung fishing lines on the ceiling from one side to another side.

 

 

Setting for chairs:



Then books and clocks:

 

Finally we stuck the paper butterflies everywhere.

 

Pictures below are the final version of our work taken in different angles, lightings and distances.

 

Reflection

To be frank, due to limited resources and time, we had to keep on thinking whether our original design was work in the sidecar and whether we can create the effect we want audience to feel. We used a temporarily abandoned sidecar for our art installation. We think that what we have done is an experiment indeed as creating such a huge installation is still very new to us. We were willing to try our best to finish our design and see if it is work. We are not just focusing on the result, but also the process we have gone through.

We need to start from scratch and do something with its value. Our performance and art work caught a lot of attentions of people passing by. With the support and advice of the technicians there, the progression was going very smoothly. However, during the process, we still met lots of difficulties. For example, the area of the sidecar is much bigger than we thought so we had to change our plan. Also, we failed to place the wallpaper on the wall which forced us to rethink and restart the decoration of the walls. We needed to think of a solution immediately as time waits for no one. Something thankful was that we both did not ever think to give up our work.

The construction of this art installation brought us very great sense of success. We enjoyed the process very much because it was the very first time we were in charge of such a large installation. Both of us contributed lots of creative ideas in the work. We were not afraid of the heavy workload as we knew that, once we insisted on what we wanted to do, we were not far from our beautiful finishing point. Moreover, although the final result is not as good as we wanted and maybe it seems a little bit messy, the outcome still enhanced our confidence towards future creation. At least we have called up of our courage to achieve our idea. It was really an unforgettable experience and we will keep this process in mind forever.