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RISOGRAPH PRINTS ON VIETNAMESE DÓ PAPER

4/11/23

INTERACTIVE WALL

ACRYLIC, VELLUM, AND MULBERRY PAPER

When I first came to MassArt as a transfer student, I had no idea what I was doing amongst all of the students that started their foundations classes during freshman year. Three years later, I still question if I truly have any idea as to what I’m doing.

Although I’m still a bit lost, I’ve always known one thing about myself– that I’m an artist at heart. As a young creative who dreamt of holding an exhibition some day, I questioned if my dream could ever become a reality. As a person who plans way too far in advance, I was already thinking about senior project ideas as a new sophomore. I thought “this could be my best chance at doing an exhibition”, but I’d soon realize how ambitious that was. Covid had just started at the time and we didn’t know if it was ever going to get better. Regardless, I always kept the idea in the back of my mind.

Fast forward to the fall of senior semester when we were formally introduced to the assignment– might I add that this was my first semester in person after attending this school remotely for 2 years straight. Wanting to take advantage of the school’s resources, I immediately began looking into reserving a gallery space and had one ready by October. Did I mention I plan ahead? We weren’t technically supposed to be doing any work until the spring, we were just supposed to think about it. But I just never know when to stop and couldn’t help myself once the juices were flowing.

I did intense concept development through the entirety of the fall, and collected inspiration from various places such as the ICA,

…and my own home. This is an are.na page where I was putting all of my ideas and collected sources into. By the the end of the semester, all we had to do was write a one page proposal. Needless to say I went a little overboard.

The initial researchable question I came up with was “how can sentiment be experienced in a way that explores culture and identity through design?”. I sketched out how I envisioned the space to look and feel, thinking about gathering different aspects of my life in order to cover the five senses to create the ultimate experience of nostalgia.

Love is a universal language, and I felt that with creating a piece that felt like an experience, everyone could relate or at least understand my project to some capacity. I wanted to create an experience that delved into the idea of the Asian stereotype of hoarding and how we will hold on to anything, including trash, because it reminds us of something or someone we long for. My memory is terrible, and I wanted something that felt raw and true to my experiences because if I was creating something for myself, I wanted to remember it. I delved deeper into the “why”s of it all, and turned it into the idea of “how sentimentality works alongside the stages of grief”. Hoarding relates to loss, because we create connections with inanimate objects to the sentimental memories we once had.

So with the amount of passion I had for this concept, I just kept pushing with the research. I already had the vision, and kept pushing it by creating playlists that “sounded” like what I was feeling, so I could listen to them when I felt like I was losing ideas.

And when I got stuck, I just wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote.

And then there was a point in my development where I felt like I couldn’t get unstuck. By some twisted coincidence– during the same week that the spring semester started, and my second week settling into Bose, my maternal grandma was diagnosed with a late stage of heart failure and I was tested to explore the stages of grief in real time. Though thankfully, she’s still here with us, I had the looming fear that the diagnosis was too severe for her to pull through by the time I graduated. The irony of it all was that my concept was about grief and loss, whilst I was grieving someone that was still here.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, the symposium presentation date was moved up 2 weeks. I lost the space reservation and my wishes of doing an exhibition basically went down the drain.

I expressed to my professors that I was having a hard time, and tried to figure out how to work on such an emotional project without getting emotional.

Even though the semester just started, I felt like I was already behind. My medium had to change, my concept had to change, and nothing felt right anymore. I circled back to all of the ideas I had prior to what I settled on, and noted which ones could be improvised now that I couldn’t do a gallery.

As I went back to the drawing board, I created a mind map to reorganize my thoughts. One theme that kept coming up was food, which then I realized how so many of my memories involved eating and sharing food with others. I played with the idea of food as a portal to memory– how to bridge my previous idea with the new one. how food could transport us into remembering a time in our lives through the five senses.

This reminded me of a photography project I had previously worked on called “cut fruit”, where I explored generational traditions through an act of service. I’ve always wanted to continue this project in some way, as I’ve loved the idea of Asian families displaying love through ways that are not the conventional five love languages.

I wanted to expand upon this idea by exploring food as a form of love and how it covers all five love languages whilst being its own language at the same time.

Pushing obstacles aside, this was my new researchable question: How can food be experienced as a form of a sixth love language in a way that explores cultural identity through design?

Although this wasn’t the idea I originally intended, I think it was the one I was meant to do. This idea was more about presenting and the way I wrote my “speech” if you will, which I really wanted to avoid because I have stage fright. As a visual designer that is always talking with my hands and never really forming any coherent sentences– I’d say I’m not the best with my words.

This resulted in the “final product” being a video. I used to always carry a camera around as a kid, and recorded everything I could, so this was quite fitting.

I wanted something that spoke for itself. Though I had a rough script to layout some frames, I never intended on having a script. I just wanted to show clips that created the feeling I wanted to present– which brings me to the video style: corecore.

Corecore is an emerging visual style that is a compilation of “bite sized expression of ideas and issues that get across effortlessly because you’re stitching together other pieces of media to do it for you, mending them to create an intimate feeling”.

It’s almost as if someone couldn’t say or write the words they wanted but instead presented an image or clip that immediately got the point across. We’re in a world where theres so much to consume in such little time, and Genz struggles to make meaningful art because were in the generation where its difficult to be original. We barely have anything unique to us, so we take old things and make them ours by modernizing them into something that is more socially acceptable, just to quickly get over it and move on to the next thing.

It’s a bit difficult to explain just in words, but ideally I want this video to gain a reaction. Whether its sadness, happiness, nostalgia, longing, or however love makes you feel– I’ll take it. *Play video.

As mentioned, the video was not the original intent– but rather to provide the ambient feeling that i was looking to create in the experience had I done the exhibition. I worked with what I had, and still tried my best to make this an experience of some kind. These are some screenshots of the editing and trailer I posted to my website at the time.

With the poster, I wanted to allude to the idea of corecore without it feeling too obvious. I did some color and typographic exploration to give off the chaotic feeling that corecore feels like, and some more simple designs to feel the exact opposite.

These are a few iterations with the new sizing. I experimented more with the layout, as I felt this made more sense tying into the video because the clips are arranged in an unconventional way.

This is how the final poster came out.

Before I realized the required poster size, I had already designed iterations with intentions on printing it on the risograph printer. After the change, I turned them into invitation cards. They were printed on mulberry paper which I ordered from a small business in Vietnam, where they are one of the only people left in the world that still make this paper in its traditional form.

The motifs within the cards are taken from new years flowers called cay mai, where the arrangement is used to hang up money pockets. My grandma likes to hang them with thin red sewing thread to “blend in”.

The prints that I made ended up going on an interactive piece as well. Here are some photos of the room I presented in, I also served food– of course. But I only got a photo of the aftermath unfortunately... I promise it I woke up at 6am to fry 200 eggrolls with my mom this photo doesn’t do it justice.

Since, as this project was about love– I wanted to include people that I love. The photo in the middle is me and my art teacher– who not only taught me in senior year of high school and wrote my letter of rec for art school– but was also originally my art teacher from my middle school who I had known since i was just 10 years old. Not pictured, but honorable mentions– my teacher from 7th grade who always told his students to embrace our culture. A core memory for me was when he had the class bring in cultural food for a day to share with each other, and he always mentioned how much he loved eggrolls.

The prints that I made ended up going on an interactive piece as well. I even gathered more responses during portfolio night, which was just two nights before my graduation. Although it felt a bit backwards to gather responses after the presentation was over– it was intentional I promise. Every collected response responded to the prompt “how do you say I love you without actually saying it?”. I wanted to know if my project truly resonated with everyone the way that I had hoped, and sure enough– I got a lot of great responses.

For the last few weeks of the semester, we had to work on a process book. Though the final process book is mainly to gather everything together, I wanted to take one last opportunity and make something that exceeds my own expectations.

I had so many images and writing that couldn’t possibly be shown in a 20 minute presentation or a short video. During the final weeks of the semester, I used my process book as a continuation of this project to use everything I’ve collected to its fullest potential. After all, I didn’t go through thousands of my grandfathers old photos for nothing. There is too much I want to say and so many stories to tell.

I basically pour my heart and soul into 87 pages, and I think between designing, printing, laser cutting, binding, graduation, and just having been briefed for Prince all within the same 2 weeks– I don’t even know how I did it. All I have to say is autopilots a crazy concept. Anyway, from the acrylic cover feeling like a menu under glass at an asian restaurant, to vellum between pages to feel like a hazed memory– I wanted to use materiality in this book to emphasize my ideas even more. And its so perfectly imperfect. Rough edges, mismatched covers, dull imagery– it feels so wrong to a person like me that is so strict about my work being clean. I even had to resist the urge of wiping the fingerprints, because why should I remove the memory of those who held it?

Nothing is clean and perfect about a memory, its about the way it makes you feel even if you can’t see it the way it once was.

During my initial presentation, I thanked my mom of course– mainly because she inspired the title of this piece. She actually didn’t want to see my work, mainly because she didn’t really understand why I carried a camera in her face for the last few months or what this project was about no matter how many times I explained. My mom’s reaction to my proposal statement was actually “I don’t get it, why would I need to think about how I love you when I cook? When I make food, I just make it. Why would I have to say I love you?”.

As a kid, I always went out of my way to take care of people that I liked even if I got hurt in the end. At the time, I didn’t know “acts of service” was my love language, I just liked to do it. Though my parents are always telling me “just worry about yourself”, I’ve never had too much interest in thinking about my own happiness. So when I spoke to one of my mentors, Ryan Diaz, he told me “you’re not making this for anyone but yourself. it’s whatever you want it to be”. Honestly, that made me want to throw up a little. The amount of creative freedom was liberating yet extremely terrifying. This project wasn’t directed to any professor or client, this was something I was finally allowed to have full control over, and I hated it. I hated that I had to make something that was “for me”, because I wanted it to be for everyone else. Whether the idea was about memory, sentiment, food, love, I always imagined the end result to be something that people could remember and enjoy.

I wanted to emphasize the idea of showing love through the most mundane and ordinary of ways.

Love can be experienced in a multitude of ways, and this is how I wanted you all to experience it from me. And if there’s one takeaway from this experience, I hope it’s that you’ve acknowledged the idea of love is everywhere and that you go home tonight and tell someone that you love and appreciate them– now matter how you choose to show it or say it. Love is all around, and it might just be right under our noses.

Thank you.