Fanshu Yun
Professor Emma Bowen
Integrative Seminar 1
15 December 2017
Artist’s Statement
My name is Fanshu (Jessie). I am from Beijing, China. I am studying strategic design. I have not yet clearly made up my mind on what I want to be or what I want to do with art, but I consider myself as student and I always try to learn something. To better understand art, I am currently on the way to grasp the knowledge about art and building artistic skills.
Throughout the semester in this course, we have studied about broad range of topics. Beginning from searching for fake articles and knowing basic concepts regarding “fakeness” in the world, we started to apply those ideas to our own thoughts and experiences. Most of the portfolio I dealt with was about exposing the truth inside human beings and the world.
I was asked to look through the “fake” in real life at first. Our first assignment was a writing assignment, to write about a memoir about the time when I felt like I was fake or I needed to be fake. I basically wrote about the countless times when I was not being myself, but being someone else not knowing where I was. I wrote, that I was rather like a “zombie”.
The second assignment was more like an interview or a communication with my classmates. We were asked to send postcards that respond to questions. Those questions were somewhat private and something we would do unconsciously, so it not only allowed my classmate to know about me but I also got to know about myself. Something that was uncovered was covered in this assignment. What I felt throughout and after this assignment was that unknown things are revealed only when we just noticed them.
In seminar class, we were asked to write a 21st century travel guide. Our group was assigned to write about Gaza strip and I wrote a travel guide to different places in Gaza in a zookeeper’s view. At first, I thought that it was not really a good idea to write, especially a travel guide, to a deserted place like Gaza. It is where continuous wars take place, and where visiting is strictly prohibited or regulated in real world. I felt like it would not be as attractive as writing about places in the world that inhibit so much beauty of nature and attraction. So this was the hardest part for me, because what I felt was that I needed to keep making things up or extend my idea to somewhere that “fools” people to believe that what is not appealing to be appealing. However, one thing that I significantly learned through the process of this assignment was the strategy to convert one fact to the opposite way, and to write about a topic that is not yet supported by the truth.
My final project was one of the hardest writing assignments I have been given so far in my life. We were asked to write a “worker’s diary”, and our group was assigned cabinetmaker during Luis XIV era. This assignment also accompanied with actual presentation with slides, so I had to write a paper while putting critical informations on the slides. I found it very interesting to get to know about the arts and furnitures in luxurious era in France. My part in this project was “why the object was significant”. During research process, I noticed that there are not many articles dealing directly with the topic, so again, I had to assemble information from numerous sources together in order to relate them to my actual topic. For instance, I searched for informations about French furnitures during 18th Century and other informations about cabinets made in France. Then, I combined and rearranged the informations to correctly answer to my topic.
After this semester, I have felt not only from this class but from other classes, that art is not what I have always thought it to be. I questioned myself so many times if I really belong to art and I found myself underestimating myself comparing to others and hearing so many criticisms. This course has been useful in that I could improve the eye to critically view the world. I will keep questioning myself, being lost in sense of belongingness, however, I would continue to question until I could reach to the answer.
