Bridge #1: Project Dissection
When a specific project that I need recalled, I would say my final studio and seminar project from last semester. It was the most successful one throughout the whole semester. My last final studio project has four different topics that we can choose. I extremely remembered I stuck choosing between doppelganger and cultural appropriation. I did some research in this two topic. Such as movie reference, photography, gallery, and drawing. My mind has ideas but it flows all over the place and couldn’t put together. But luckily, I met a Chinese taxi driver, after I talked to him. He told me that he came to United States 30 years already and Chinatown is same as 30 years ago. Everything looks the same, never ever changed. From his speaking, I chose topic in cultural appropriation to start with. In general, I created some spider web brainstorming by time, place, type, and aspect of the larger topic. From web research, Chinatown is located at the Lower portion of Manhattan. New York’s Chinatown is the largest of Chinatown in the United States. They have the largest Chinese population and civilization on the western side of the hemisphere. It consists of two square miles of shops, homes, restaurants, and much more for the Chinese community. The population is estimated at around 70,000 to 150,000 citizens. Here is the place that they have American Dream.
From this simply research; I break down into subtopic– immigration, American dream, and elder’s life and photo book. Photo book is my main idea for final project. I want to use photograph to express my idea. Immigration and American dream are interconnections. Chinese immigrants began civilization in Chinatown around the middle of the 18th century. There were only small numbers of immigrants to start with. Every immigrant comes with his or her American dream. All they want is work to make money. They came over for work rather than their freedom. Nowadays, the first community group that is older than 60 years old. They are low income, lack of education group, and they still working as they live never stop. Through out this point, I started to walk around Chinatown and take photograph of elders. I spent whole day in Chinatown taking photograph.
After I took photograph from Chinatown. I started with the layout; my idea for the book design is simply and clean. Nothing much in the cover, I named the book “獨在異鄉為異客” in Chinese, this means “a stranger in a strange land”. Furthermore, every five images, I combine them with a Chinese quote. When the viewer read it, it makes more touching and deeply from heart. All the images are editing in black and white in basic.
From this final project, I learned a lot from it. The most helpful and important part for this project is research. I don’t have much change between original assignment and final execution. I stick in what I need to do. Also I learned lots of history for the immigrations. I knew where to start. However, if I could revise the project now, I would love to change the printing style. I would like to change my book into perfect binding. That will look more professional in some sense.
