CULTURE JAMMING
The idea of culture jamming is not that popular in China since the Chinese government seems prevent it from happening. Culture jamming is a method to satirize some negative sides in the society by a direct or indirect way. Commonly, culture jamming touches some aspects that does not follow the main stream of the society or wish of the government. However, the creation of culture jamming is necessary because it can evoke people to notice some sensitive aspects within the society and pushes the whole environment to progress.
The culture jamming project I created this time was about criticizing the Chinese culture revolution which is a sensitive topic that can hardly heard in China. The Chinese culture revolution happened between 1966 to 1976. The whole action mainly focused on to clear all the things that contains culture background and generated Chinese own socialism. The whole movement was led by Mao Zedong who was the first chairman in China and wanted everything related to capitalism staying away from China. Culture revolution happened in Mao’s late year, a group of people also tried to use this advantage to disturb his decision and hindered stable of Chinese society. During the ten years period, all things related to capitalism was destroyed by the government. And the situation even went uncontrolled in the middle of the culture revolution. Operas, universities, historic records and relic were all regarded as capitalism. Teachers, students and young people with high education were all regarded as reactionaries. Ironically, those historic records and well educated people were the one that used to help Mao build the People’s Republic of China.
By playing with the words Chairman and decomposing the idea of chair, I planned to make a real chair. From my point of view, chair means supporting and adding pressure. I thought about making a four leg chair in stead of three or even more because four legs could stand for a group of four top leaders that supported Mao waging the culture revolution. My design of the chair mainly focused on the chair that Mao often seated and to scale the chair, I did researches online using the method of proportion(Research for Mao’s height and calculate both his arm and leg length) to design the chair that almost has the same proportion as chairman Mao’s chair did. The format of this artwork was decided as sculpture in stead of a real chair because seating on Mao’s face is offensive and it will lead the meaning toward another direction.
The material of making the chair was originally decided to be wood but changed to acrylic boards in the end. The characteristic of transparency of acrylic boards ironically states the Chinese government nowadays is not that transparent. And the acrylic boards share the common characteristic as Mao’s coffin that still exist in Tian’an Men Square in Beijing, China. The whole design process was done on both Adobe Illustrator and Auto CAD by how detail each sections on chair needed to be.
Because of the limitation for the laser cutter, each sections of the chair can only be glue together layer by layer, in order not to break the transparency of acrylic boards, crystal resin was used as the glue for each layer.
After each parts of the chair was constructed by three layers, the whole chair was connected together by the glue gun for the reason that it drys fast and can maintain the shape strongly.
The Chinese characters on the chair legs represents objects that were destroyed by Chinese government which makes the whole feeling stronger.
Mao on the seating parts of the chair stand for how Mao was adding pressure to all the people who used to help him build the country. It is also supported by four top leaders who support Mao’s crazy behavior.
