Professional Statement

My work this year has been informed by a combination of feedback and experience – being both a designer and a maker. It is more comprehensive than pure conceptual design. It is a kind of understanding of how ideas work better and dive deeper to induce a change in behavior. As a Designer Maker, I make products with crafts elements such as wood, metal, and ceramics based on sketches, software, and test works.

I work in many materials and formats, including drawing, printmaking, laser cutting and engraving, and electronic media. My recent MA course works use mixed media collage. The theme I have been working with this year is A New Perception of Death represent a cherished and long-standing commitment to woodworking and mechanical engineering as a way of exploring psychological and philosophical ideas, and cultural phenomena in sensuous visual materials and tactile embodied forms.

I think of these works as "recombinants". For they recombine not only traditional media such as wood and metal working with the much newer methods of 3D printing & laser works collage and cross montage. However, they also speak of the psychic state of the body today - Social development and change, which has been violently cobbled together from economic, cultural, and political fragments.

The quality of people's lives and some habits and customs have changed accordingly under these new conditions. The element of manual handcrafting can return the beautiful image of original nature to modern society under tremendous pressure.

I was initially inspired by this view during the summer vacation. After my dear grandfather passed away. There is a saying in my hometown, and the soul will return home on the forty-ninth day after death. However, I hurried to London to start the course before I could attend the memorial ceremony. In today's world, with so much traffic, it is inevitable for people to leave their hometown to study and work and come to a strange city or country. Homesickness comes from nostalgia for things at home. For most people, leaving forever is an unacceptable fact, but they have to face. Because the topic of death is taboo even in most countries and regions. But just as life is inevitable, so is death. Even now, it is difficult to carry out some complicated ceremony to commemorate the death and the memory of lovesickness. Why not have a positive perspective and approach to death in a simplified, local way that follows the traveler to a different place?

Reshaping the perception about death, there are plenty of designers. Among which a Japanese designer – Aya Kishi’s After the Rain and the concept of Mexico’s death – the day of the dead, both give a positive attitude towards end. Mainly inspired by these instances is that the celebration of death in Mexican and Ghana culture is rare in the world. Most regions face death with a mourning and unwilling bearing. In Aya Kishi's works, he uses the principle of a triangular prism that refracts sunlight and turns into a rainbow, giving a new scene of depressive tomb sweeping. People would think of the warm moments of the deceased because of this beautiful light and heal their inner wounds while embracing good wishes. Combining a positive attitude with the desire to heal people’s internal trauma. My work hopes to bring people a different understanding of death and hope for life after facing with death.

In the process of research, I discovered that storage vessels are an indispensable existence in the death ceremony. However, in the context of the current era, a storage vessel that can carry, does not occupy too much space, and is given a particular meaning is very worthy of consideration. On the structure and driving principle of various decryption magic boxes, combined with the rain force, is composed of two forces: pressure and buoyancy. After testing several ways to open the decryption box with other force drives. After confirming a scheme with smooth operation and texture, the box material has a light wood fragrance and waterproof effect.

Darkness and death aesthetics are my favorite topics. Compared with warm stories, many people prefer dark, sad stories, and many of them.

Yuanyi and Sanding (2005) have discussed that the so-called tragedy is to tear up beautiful things for you. There has always been a unique aesthetic concept in the aesthetics of the Orientals. The Japanese call it "object mourning" （物の哀れ）

, but in China, it can be understood as "sensing things". (Baker, 2001) In a sense, when "beauty" is torn apart, death gives beauty a deep meaning. While feeling sad, people realize that beauty is hard-won and precious. Pain is real; sadness is deep-seated. It quickly reminds you of the tragic things that happened to you, giving you shock and thinking.

Due to the obstacles of this epidemic, many aspects have not well test. The original idea for this project was to use a water-filled pipe with a spring at the bottom. In which was filled with water and dropped below the slide rail so that the box could be opened. To what I am worry about is whether the spring test can help the pipe sink to the appropriate position. I want to continue to advance this project in the future not only in the material of the box. I may use several different scented kinds of woods to test their fragrance time to help bring aromatherapy to people when opening the box. At the same time, different wood colors bring different visual feelings and tactile therapy to fans of other preferences. For the opening method of the box, I will also carry out more decryption of the trap box. So as to design a new method of lock and decryption.

Bibliography

Baker, J., 2001. Mourning and the transformation of object relationships: Evidence for the persistence of internal attachments. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 18(1), pp.55-73.

Kishi, A., 2020. After The Rain | Designboom.Com. [online] designboom | architecture & design magazine. Available at: <https://www.designboom.com/project/after-the-rain/> [Accessed 18 September 2020].

Yuanyi, X. and Sanding, Y. (2005). The Aesthetic Features of Chinese Tragedy. Journal of Jishou University. Jishou: Social Sciences Edition, 2005