TINGTING WU
2016-2018 Wimbledon college of art (UAL), MFA Fine Art
The two-year study in MFA is very interesting and fruitful for me. In the beginning, I was interested in CCTV monitoring equipment. My source materials mainly come from daily life and portrait photographing, and I used them to explore the social monitoring environment. But my works are just limited to painting media for concept conveying. Personally I don’t want to get away from this artistic media which makes me feel comfortable.
KEY INFLUENCES: Firenze Lai, Marlene Dumas
The second unit mainly discussed about the relationships between loneliness, concern and group in modern social life. My inspirations come from my uninterruptedly appeared questions on particular occasions and my exploration and perception of these phenomena. During my creation, I used metaphorical image language to express social problems and pose problems. I started to rearrange the elements in the painting to construct a 3D artwork combining with painting.
KEY INFLUENCES: Sandy Skoglund, Rachel Whiteread, Alone Together
In the third unit, I turned my eye on the relationship between group behaviors and individual behaviors to the relationship between social monitoring and its restriction of human behaviors, and I also considered the existing rules as well as their reasonability in social structure. I mainly used acrylic materials and interesting daily necessaries to make the device and convey the concept. I enjoyed it very much to discover the uncertainty during the arrangement, reorganization and re-creation of the materials.
KEY INFLUENCES: Jakub Geltner, David Spriggs, Rose Wylie
THE PARTY
This work is based on the thinking of safety, restriction and group control. In the safe, I created a variety of groups. People in each group follow the same law of motion. Each person wears a paillette that can reflect others, and through which this person can also see himself. Different sized eyes were arranged on the wall. Life is different, but people need to be gregarious under certain systems. As a result, human’s desires are suppressed. Perhaps diversification can make us feel free, but gregarious life can keep us safer. But safety also means more restrictions. There is no absolute safe space and absolute safe space means absolute restriction. Just like the “life” in the safe, safety can be ensured under surveillance from all directions, while the “life” outside the safe is completely transparent. Some people tried to get in the safe through current security rules. However, he would realize at last that what he accessed is just another restricted space. In this space, people are under full surveillance, and everyone is striving to make their way into a certain group and join their performance.
Any social system is assimilating the human being. There seems to be incompatible contradiction between human sociality and the id. This brainwash attempt of personality unification and homogenization has never stopped in various conventions and regulations in the real world. Only by refocusing on man and the differences between them can we get rid of the absurdity under extreme institutionalization.
The corner
For this work, my inspiration is based on the thinking of the positive and negative effects of contemporary monitoring mechanism on the social culture. In the present era, the operation of the real society or the cyber world is exposed in a huge monitoring mechanism. People’s trace of life, data or even privacy are being unconsciously recorded all the time. The original intention of monitoring is for human security. But more and more dimensions of artificial monitoring didn’t bring more stability and security to the social culture.
I used transparent acrylic materials and mirror to make a space with different hierarchies which has nowhere to hide. When I was making this work, I had trouble in finding the right place for each piece of material. I hoped to use them to make a multidimensional transparent space or even create a visual illusion. This part took me a lot of time. I learned that artist David Spriggs has made a series of large-scale works related to modern monitoring, color and power symbols with acrylic materials. His “The Logic of Control” has given me some inspirations in material using and designing.
One of the reports that I collected revealed that a large part of people dislike being monitored. However, the strange thing is that they showed “surveillance apathy” on this matter and think it unnecessary to take any action, or they would make compromise although they realized their privacy security is at risk. A micro laptop is placed in the corner. The screen of the laptop is made by a mirror. People cannot see their face in the mirror from some angles, but their traces are mapped in the mirror when they get close to or pass by the laptop. The laptop reflected my thinking on network monitoring because people usually ignored that their behaviors or even privacy were unconsciously recorded in the cyber world.
Untitled
This picture, which is created with “eyes” element, is about the capturing of people’s privacy by intelligent positioning and computer cameras. Nowadays, with the development of intelligent positioning technologies, people are easier to track especially when they often take video communication with friends, share their positions in social media, and search nearby friends or make friends with strangers through communications media. However, these activities would also cause different levels of leakage of their privacy. In 2012, for example, some of Shanghai’s crimes were committed by using cell phone positioning. And the rate of this kind of crimes is still increasing. Computer camera is one of the ways that hackers used to invade and steal user’s data. I think people’s privacy is under constant threat.
I was inspired by Stéphane Degoutin’s online interactive device work of Google House, from which I think of that Google Map can even show people’s home decorations clearly. The logo of Google app provided me with some inspirations, and I designed and made “eyes” into the logo. The picture shows a huge laptop, inside of which there are more computers and floating eyes. I made this arrangement to show the possibilities of our privacy being stolen layer by layer in the cyber world. The cameras on the screen were replaced by eyes, which reminds people that we may leak our privacy under the cameras.
CHAOS
In the painting, I depict a lot of bedside lamps, at first bedside lamps do not take the cable, but it has a simple halo, like the idealism I suddenly think of. Then bedside lamps are connected to the power, but still dull. And also, some lamps fall to the ground, or there is just a lampshade. I use these different forms of bedside lamps to represent my own ideas, and the reason why I chose the bedside lamp is because it also gives people a comfortable, warm feeling, just as I always stay in my comfort circle to think about the problem, but cannot get the fruit. Some eyes are always around in different places, I use this to express my thoughts which are always too divergent, seemingly central, but always floating back and forth. There are many exits, but not exit, and finally, the bedside lamp turns into a balloon, and flies away.
I hope my eye elements will no longer exist in the picture, so I used wood to make some eye-shaped models, then coated the models with turbid colour, and these models will be showed in the exhibition as well. Influenced by Sandy Skoglund's work Revenge of the Goldfish, I decided to hang these eyes from the ceiling during the exhibition. I may feel deeper about this group of works because it is indeed somewhat emotional, which may cause an understanding bias for the audience.
SUBTERRANEAN
This work was created after learning about the historical background of Crypt Gallery. Crypt Gallery is now an underground gallery, but historically it used to serve as a church basement and as a morgue and refuge during the war. The terrain structure of the gallery and background information remind me of Aldwych tube station, an old tube station in London. It is now a closed metro platform where the abandoned sections of the station and the running tunnels were used to collect artwork from public galleries and museums in London during World War II and also used as the viewing spot for many movies after the station was closed. I think there are some commonalities between these two places, and even though they no longer exist for the original functions, they all have functions and historical meanings different from the past in some historical periods, and until now there are also the meaning and function of their existence.
I started to conceptualize the painting related to the metro, I seized the main feeling every time I take the metro as a source of my inspiration. I think almost every time I take the metro, more or less will think there is an awkward silence in the carriage. People are close, do not speak, but with the eye of each other to explore and observe from time to time. Sometimes take a look at the shoes opposite the passengers, sometimes take a look at the passenger's fingers here, or that passenger's hairstyle, but just do not speak. Once the eyes meet, most people will glance in other direction. I think people’s state in this situation.
In my picture, although I only portrayed two specific passengers, I would like to express the feeling that in fact there are a lot of people together in this carriage. The eye element in this picture represents the place where other invisible passengers look, but also represents a state of being their own.
GAZING
The eyes I draw do not have a focusing centre, they just float in a space. I painted on the wrinkled tin foil with acrylic and then pasted it around eyes. The reason why the use of the tinfoil painting is because I think the clear line of the folded tin foil looks like the material world we live, which seems to be obvious but complex and changeable, and we live in such an environment. I also drew a sitting little man on an eye, In fact, I think the whole picture does not have the feeling of loneliness without the little man, so I created him, a man surrounded by many eyes. This is my understanding of people’s state of life in this city, people who stay in a place for a long time does not focus on each other and people are accustomed to such a state. But at some moments, a person may feel deeply lonely, though there are so many people around them.
This is my first artwork that concerns social monitoring environment. I used “eyes” element in my painting to present the prevalence of CCTV in people’s living environment. I attempted to construct a weird picture that combines the reality and the virtual world. I started from here to think deeply about the relationships between the monitoring and the social environment and personal privacy.