For this project, we are working with Photoshop. The theme to work with is cultural differences, the theme is quite hard to work with because we are trying to show the differences between cultures by putting and merging them together.

HOLLOW(series) #1

HOLLOW(series) #2
The title of my work is ‘hollow’, first, visually, it is a piece where I have a
part of my body disappear, and levitate, so it looks like I am hollow. Inside me, there are buildings of m
y two cultures. It is supposed to show that my outside is just my skin wrapping what I really am, my identity, what and who I think I am. I did a series of composite images, and they relate to each other by sharing the same elements of surrealism: levitation, juxtaposition, and scale. Also sharing the same color scheme: red, pink and grey. The smoke around me is trying to tell that just by my eyes, I cannot see or myself completely, I have to feel what’s inside me that makes me myself. One more thing is that the smoke/mist partly represents the pollution of China, which is in one of my cultures. The cultures that I tried to show in my piece is Chinese and American. This series’ name is called HOLLOW because, in my heart, I don’t know where exactly I belong to, and knowing that really makes me feel just a little bit lonely I guess. If I choose another person as my subject, I would try to not use pictures of themselves but use more symbolism (make my piece less literal).
Detail about the surreal devices that I used:
First, I used levitation in my piece by cutting a part of my body off which visually looks like my upper body is floating, it is my favorite device to use in a project, because what I feel is
that it creates a very relaxing and spacious feeling, it calms me down.
Second, I used juxtaposition. Buildings don’t normally be inside humans, what I am doing here is that I am representing my two converging cultures with buildings and merge it into my body, which means I was born with this, this is my identity.
Jayan Saputra inspired me in this project. I borrowed the idea of cutting off half of the head and putting something in it. When I saw the picture, it’s like something just suddenly went through my head, and I had an idea of what to do.
My studio piece is completely different from what I imagined it would be. My first idea was quite literal. It was me sitting in a boat and traveling from one end to the other end of the sea. Now I think that if I have enough time, I can do my initial idea too. In this project, the challenges that happened to me was that I couldn’t create realistic shadows, even I watch tutorials. Also, when I put cloud onto my piece, it was weird and not realistic, and I didn’t know how I can make it better. To overcome the challenge, I asked for feedback from people. After that, I was able to make my work better. There is another way, which is to look at my work from far away, I learned that from sketching.
I challenged myself to use some new ideas and techniques that I learned during class watching tutorials. For example, I learned to warp things, crop, and how to select hair properly. I tried very hard to improve my workmanship by constantly checking the quality of the pictures, the edges, and the masks. Before this project, I used to not care about having clear edges, but now, I want every picture that I use to be perfect, even it is only a little bird flying on top of the sky.
For this project, I engaged in my work by focusing on it 100% while working on it, thinking about how I can enhance it to make it better, and do my best. For example, I was asking my friends during lunch how I can make this piece better.
During the process of creating my final product, I actually had a lot of different ideas for what to do. But reflecting upon those ideas, they are either too literal or not feasible.

For this picture, I was going to put bubble around me which has famous places and buildings of the cultures in it, but I found that not feasible because the bubble makes whats inside it changes, curves it, and with different lighting, everything changes, so I couldn’t find a good background to use.
I tried to look at other people’s artwork for inspiration and looked at a few famous artists. It helped me a lot because I got to know how artists work in their studio, what it takes them to create their final product, and how they manage their time well so that their project will be finished on time.
This picture inspired me to create my artwork. By Jayan Saputra