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| H4: Descriptions of previous/ongoing work
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| == '''Being Yellow''' - 2010-2013 ==
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| The conflicting identity of being raised 'Dutch' by foster parents, while simultaneously knowing my biological parents are the basis for Being Yellow. In Being Yellow I literally comment on my ethnicity, (chosen and given) identity and personal experiences by using yellow and white body paint to express and contrast feelings of comfort and discomfort. Being Yellow consists of photos and Riso- and screenprints. The Riso prints are personalized banknotes where I replaced the image of a head with mine. Each banknote is single handed numbered and signed by me. The original banknotes, better knows as Hell money (footnote, wiki eng), are actually meant to be burned and offered to the deceased. My intention is not to have my own Hell money, instead the function of mine is to make people happy. In Being Yellow I succeeded, in my opinion, for the first time to balance concept with outcome.
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| Being Yellow is inspired by Yinka Shonibare's photo series Diary of a Victorian Dandy (footnote,1998) where he features himself as a dandy in various scenes (Kuiper, 2015) and the early works of Anthony Goicolea (footnote, website goicolea 1999-2004, site), where he depicts himself multiple times in staged scenes. Years later I discovered the works of Singaporean performance artist Lee Wen. And when you see Lee's work and my work next to each other, you can clearly see some similarities. Lee is best known for his work Journey of a Yellow Man (1992), a performance piece where his body is painted in yellow. His work deals with social identity themes and exists of mixed-media works, installations, performances and paintings (wiki). He chooses yellow paint to emphasis his ethnicity at first hand, but apart from that he hopes to elevate the symbolism of yellow to that of the color of the sun or gold, which are according to Lee often associated with energy, nobility and spirituality.
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| From a conceptual perspective my works share references with Lee's work. Lee is born in Singapore and when he was studying in London he was often misperceived as a mainland Chinese. At the same time, because he was living in a predominantly white society, he was vulnerable to racism (Lee, 2009). The assigning of yellow to the Asian race is prevalent in Western society. Swedish scientist and botanist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) differentiated the human race in four categories of which the Asian (Homo Sapiens Asiaticus) is described among other things yellow. This perception is still present in today's view and is one of the reasons in Lee's work and my work to use the color yellow.
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| =='''TE KOOP'''==
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| Te Koop (For Sale) is an online project in which I investigate the meaning of promotional images, means of looking at images and the communication between me and potential buyers on sites like Craigslist.org and Marktplaats.nl.For Te Koop I take photos of carefully arranged sets where at first sight the subject of the photo is a bike or a piece of furniture (e.g. a sofa or a desk). I add detail to the set, in the form of objects and pictures that refer to me as a person and pictures of previous works I made. The set is finished by including myself somewhere hidden in the scene. To make it more difficult for viewers to spot me in the photo I try to merge with the white walls by wearing an especially made white suit and by painting my face in white as well.
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| The final photo together with a short description of the item I want to sell is turned into an online advertisement. Through the use of fake profiles on different commodity markets I am able to reach a wide variety of people from different countries. The advertisements serve as a bait for potential buyers to elicit responses, because I have no intention of actually selling the objects. Instead my intention in Te Koop is to investigate how people respond and communicate on commodity markets and if there are differences in number of responses, length of responses, uses of languages across the different commodity markets and preferences for certain objects.
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| Te Koop yielded hundreds of responses from commodity markets all around the world. There are many differences across countries in number of responses and length and tone of responses. This together with product preferences across countries is made visible by me in my first publication about Te Koop where I present all the responses on the advertisement of the Sprintello Racing Bike.
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| Te Koop is inspired by my own experiences on commodity markets. Whenever I was trying to buy something, I felt uncomfortable not knowing to whom I was talking. When the transfer was arranged and I had to meet the seller in person I always was a bit afraid what to encounter and afraid of being set up. Nevertheless it went always well, but these personal fears became important for the concept of Te Koop. At the same time I encountered the works of Desiree Palmen (footnote) and Liu Bolin (footnote), two artist that mastered the technique of disguising a person (in the case of Bolin it is himself) in a surrounding. The project Woman Not Included of Maria Zendrera is closely related to mine. Like in Te Koop, Zendrera's project investigates the boundaries of commodity markets. In Woman Not Included Zendrera makes use of the context of the commodity market to investigate if the inclusion of a partially nude body helps in selling a product (footnote).
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| =='''Project: Unboxing'''==
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| For my project Unboxing I decided to work again in the context of commodity markets. Instead of being the seller as in Te Koop, I decided to be the buyer. I became interested in stamp albums, preferably the ones who also contained actual stamps. An abundance of stamp albums of different qualities can be find on commodity markets. An Important condition was that the stamp albums, I became interested in, would fit a standard mailbox.
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| For Unboxing I tried to buy stamp albums and when I came to an agreement with a seller I asked the seller a favor. Instead of sending the stamp album safely packed in a box with my address written on top, I asked the seller to enclose with tape any parts of the album that could fall open during transportation and secondly to write my address on the cover of the album. Though it caused some extra negotiating back and forth, in the end the sellers did sent me the albums the way I wanted. Upon arrival I unpacked the parcel carefully in a fixed set and filmed the procedure with two cameras, 1) close up, focused on my hands and 2) an overview shot. The video works I made for Unboxing show me unpacking stamp albums that are turned into parcels. The video ends with me showing the content of the album.
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| Unboxing is a popular phenomenon that exist in the context of Youtube. The people who make unboxing videos open boxes and at the same time comment on what they are unpacking. The first unboxing video came from Yahoo Tech in 2006 and showed the unboxing of a Nokia E61 (wiki). Currently Youtube is full with unboxing videos. Basically everything that is for sale, is probably unboxed on youtube (art1). Unboxing videos attracts millions of viewers all around the world. It is a lucrative business for both Vloggers and product manufacturers. The manufacturers get relatively cheap exposure of their products in videos that are uploaded to popular mass media (art3).
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| =='''Rejected'''==
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| Rejected is a project that has its roots in 2010. That year I visited my old elementary School Vest. The school set up an exhibition of yearbook photos that they had in their archive. Some of my childhood photos were exhibited as well and I asked them if I could borrow and to digitise them. I took three boxes full of photos home and when I was searching for my photos I encountered versions of photos that had a mark, mostly black, made with a pen. There were always two versions of the same child, a marked and an unmarked photo. Some closer inspection revealed to me that the marked photos show, in some occasions, a clear deficit (e.g. technical or in facial gesture), in others the difference between the two photos was hard to see.
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| The yearbook photos from the collection of School Vest come from a time when photography was an analog medium. Photographers practicing this medium where never sure if a photo they took was a success. Only after developing the could compare and decide which of the photos they had taken was the successful one. It is then logical that photographers making yearbook photos would sometimes make several photos of the same person, because 1) they noticed a technical mistake while making the picture (e.g. equipment failure or lack of skills from the photographers side) and 2) the person in front of the lens moved or blinked his eyes on the moment of picture taking. To clearly distinguish them from each other, after developing the contact sheets, photographers used marking techniques (footnote, magnum contact sheets, foam).
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| Rejected is turned in a book and consists of 101 pairs of marked and unmarked photos that I found in the archives from School Vest. The size of the book is A5 (148x210mm). On the left page I placed the unmarked picture in its original size, on the right page I placed the marked picture enlarged to the size of the page (A5). Included is a short essay that explains the history of School Vest and the archive of yearbook photos they saved. The stream of pairs of marked-unmarked photos is interrupted by the inclusion of all my yearbook photos that where made yearly by the school's photographer. To emphasise time, my yearbook photos are chronologically placed in the book and are presented larger in size the further you get in the book.
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| The way the photos are marked give me an uncomfortable feeling. It is an aggressive act to reject a person appearance and identity is such a literal way. The choice of the photographer for marking the photos gave us an insight in how a child, in his eyes, is not supposed to be. It is interesting to compare the marked and unmarked photo with each other. The children differ much in the two photos. In my opinion the children in the marked picture look joyful and spontaneous, whereas in the unmarked photo the children have another gaze, feeling uncomfortable or maybe judged.
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| Marking of photos is not new. As described earlier it is a technique that helps photographers to chose the right photo. Usually these decisions are done privately and are not meant to be made public. A similar case to my project Rejected are the punch holes made by Roy Stryker in negatives of photographers he hired to cover daily live in the United States (footnote, explain). A bit different, but nevertheless connected to Rejected is Useful Photography third volume which is dedicated to the database of the National Missing Persons Helpline (NMPH). The photos shown of missing people get another meaning when background information about a missing person is provided. Prior to reading the text of the missing person, you experience the photo as any other photo. After knowing when and how the person disappeared gives the photo another tension (footnote magazine expand). As of today changing photos without a person's consent, evoke emotions and rupture in the affected person and the community that is involved. Student Shelby Baum found her photo being adjusted in the yearbook. In the original photo Baum was wearing a V-neck shirt revealing her tattoo. In the photo published in the yearbook her V-neck was changed into a square-neck shirt that covered her tattoo (newsflash, 2014 & art 3). Baum declared to be felt singled out, judged and humiliated (footnote art 4).
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| == '''Tinder Aesthetics''' ==
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| Tinder is an online dating application launched in 2012. Its aim is to link people together that don't know each other before, but of whom both are looking (Rad, wiki). Tinder became quickly the most leading mobile dating app with in 2014 50 million monthly users and 12 million matches per day. On average a user logs in 11 times and spend a total of 90 minutes per day on the app. As of April 2015 Tinder has 1.6 billion profiles that generate 26 million matches per day. Since its launch in 2012 8 billion matches have been made (wiki&http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/tinder-statistics/).
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| Tinder is a location-based app, it uses your GPS to find your location. Your Tinder-profile is linked to information from Facebook. It's made up of your first name, age, a maximum of 6 photos of your choice and any page you have liked on Facebook. It also shows your education and occupation. The interface is focused on pictures, but a short biography of maximum 500 words can be added. Instagram is now also linked to your Tinder-profile which allows a person to see your latest 34 Instagram snaps. Tinder finds nearby potential dates and you can influence or narrow this down by setting up age preferences and the distance from you (Art 1 Newall, 2015).
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| Tinder is among the first apps which interface is swipe-based. A right swipe is a 'Like', a left swipe is a pass. From October 2015 on Tinder made the option 'Super Like' available. This is an upward swipe that a person will see before it made a decision of liking you back. The 'Super Like' is available once per day to foster a more thoughtful use of Tinder and whom to like (art 2 Plaugic, 2015). The 'Super Like' can be seen as a response to the behaviour of 'liking' every candidate presented, which is according to the New York Times (2014) this habit is visible three times more in the behaviour of men (46%) than women (14%). Jordan Crook from Techcrunch announced in fall 2015 that Tinder introduces a new matching algorithm that looks closer to a user's behaviour. Tinder doesn't clarify exactly how its new algorithm functions, but it does says that it is now able to provide their users more relevant potential matches that hopefully leads in more meaningful connections (art techcrunch, 2015). This new algorithm together with the adding of information of work and education users now have the opportunities to make more informed decisions.
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| Tinder's interface is focused on showcasing photographs of their users. This means that your selection of photographs to show can make a difference in getting matches and eventually dates. According to sociologist Jessica Carbino a profile picture provides an important glimpse into an individual's personality. A recent study for example of 12000 profile pictures of males and females between 18-40 years of age from New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta shows that 56,2% of the female users and 72% of the male users upload pictures of themselves wearing neutral colored clothing. The favorite color seen is black, followed by white, blue and grey. In order to stand out the advice is to were vibrant colored clothes (Yi, 2016 art 4). Users of Tinder swipe through other people pictures and when two people swipe right (like) the become a match. Tinder then gives them the option to talk with each other and since January 2016 also a bunch of other tools like sending GIFs, larger emoji's and the like of individual messages from a match (Perez, 2016 techcrunch). These new set of tools together with the original options could help increase engagement and communication on Tinder.
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| Tinder is often considered to be used for hookups. In a bar you can maybe meet a few girls on a night, but with Tinder and other dating apps you have can meet hundreds of girls every day. It is more easy to meet somebody and if it doesn't work out there is always somebody else available. Using Tinder feels like a game and is addictive. It provides instant gratification to its users because they know in a split second if someone they liked likes them back. (Sales, 2015 art 8). Tinder maybe is a platform that fosters a hookup culture, it may change how we meet and date new people and it might change how we look at relationships and gender. After Sales's article Tinder denied on its Twitter account that it contributes to a hookup culture (Ramzy, 2015, art 9 yet to be summarized).
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| I started to use Tinder out of curiosity. Having heard so much about the app I thought I give it a try. I remember I was nervous the first few times I used it. What kind of pictures do I upload? Do I provide a little description of myself? How will I respond to girls with whom I form a match and do I really want to date when it comes to that point? I rarely talked to the girls I have been matched with and I don't think I was successful in attracting the girls I liked. My presence om Tinder became an experiment of what kind of girls might be interested in me and I fall into the group of men (46%) that likes every girl encountered. The more I used Tinder, the more I became aware of its unique stream of pictures. While hovering over the pictures I noticed streams of pictures that looked more or less the same. I started to screenshot them. The collection currently exists of 8000 screenshots that I grouped into categories like 'Girls kissing or being kissed by a dolphin', 'Girls riding a horse' and 'Girls eating a pizza'. Making screenshots and grouping them into categories is not unique. There are several websites online that show a certain collection derived from Tinder like 'Guysholdingfishontinder', 'Tigersoftinder' and 'Humanitariansoftinder'. In general Tinder is a popular medium to make work with. Dries Depoorter (2015 link site) for example placed in his project Tinder In the profile photos of a user's Tinder and LinkIn next to each other to show that a person's appearance differs in each platform. Brinkman, Oorschot, Maureira and Szabo (2014) make use of Tinder in another way. In their installation Tender a piece of meat is attached to a lever that rotates. A mobile phone with an active Tinder profile is placed underneath it and whenever the piece of meat is turned down it goes over the touchscreen of the phone swiping the presented profile picture of a girl right (=like). Tully Arnot (2014) works more carefully with Tinder. In his Lonely Sculpture he lets a motorised silicon finger constantly tapping the 'like'-button.
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| The work title of my project is Tinder Aesthetics and it is still in its early stage. It is unclear at this moment if the project is about collecting or that it will transform into other types of work. What I do think is that the collection is unique in itself. Because of Tinder restrictions I can only collect screenshots of people within a certain age range and distance. Age I can by pass, I can set it on unlimited, but I'm restricted by distance because Tinder only allows me to hover a 160 km radius. It is also influenced by the people on the other side. If they set their setting on an age lower or higher than mine, I won't be able to encounter them. This counts also for the distance, when my setting is set on 160 km, yet a girl who is physically for example 20 km away and have her settings for range on 10 km, than I won't encounter her unless we are less than 10 km separated from each other. The types of categories I see within the location I currently behave in might be cultural specific, influenced by the economic standards of the population in question, and geographically biased. What also matters is the quality of the mobile network in the areas I stay. For example in The Netherlands the chance of encountering a girl eating cheese, showing off with her dog and lying on the beach is higher than in North Korea or Bolivia. How would my collection look like in those countries? It would be interesting to conduct this research in the future.
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| == Graduation project: '''In Search of Perfect Orange''' ==
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| The origin of my project In Search of Perfect Orange lies in an event from Holland Got Talent in 2013 (footnote, youtube). In the particular episode Dutch jury member Gordon asked Chinese contestant Xiao Wang if he is going to sing "Nr. 39 with Rice", which refers to Chinese food, the difficult names dishes often carry and the extensive menu to choose from. Gordon's question can be considered as a racial comment that corners one of the oldests minority groups in The Netherlands. The event sparked a widespread debate that was covered by many different types of media both national and international. In a response to Gordon a group of Dutch-Chinese people launched the website nummer39metrijst.nl, where they offered the Nr.39-dish with 39% discount in 39 restaurants across the Netherlands (footnote website).
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| The comment Gordon made, didn't affected me personally. Yes, indeed it is a bit clumsy, but I was not overly moved by it. When I saw the original footage of the event I was fascinated by its richness. It was interesting to see how Wang, Gordon's fellow jury members and the audience responded to deliberate comment and that Gordon didn't stop making insinuations even after fellow jury members made clear it was not right to do (footnote, youtube). I became aware of the richness of this material and where some Dutch-Chinese people declared to take Gordon's comment as a compliment (footnote, geuzennaam website), for me it became a departure for my project.
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| When I started my project In Search for Perfect Orange my focus lay on the number Gordon used in his comment. I wondered how a Nr. 39 looked like. I started to collect menus from Chinese restaurants to see what their Nr. 39 dish was. Shortly after I decided to visit Chinese restaurants to order the Nr. 39 dish and photographing them upon arrival. This resulted in a wide variety of menus in size, color and quality. Two menus were in particular interesting, (name rest) had two Nr. 39s listed on their menu and (name rest) had deleted Nr. 39 from its menu. (footnote). It also resulted in a serie of photos that showed each time another expression of a Nr. 39-dish. The wide variety of Nr. 39 dishes didn't surprise me after seeing the diversity of the menus; I never saw on any menu the same Nr. 39 listed. Each Nr. 39 differed in type (e.g., meat or vegetarian) and size (e.g. from dim sum to a main course) (footnote, image show) and presentation (e.g. finely decorated to a condensed composition).
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| After a while I started to develop interest in two distinct genres of Youtube videos, Mukbang and videos where people made reviews of dishes the consume during for example traveling. Mukbang, which literally translates as Eating Broadcast, is a phenomenon from Korea where practitioners eat large amount of food while explaining and commenting on what they eat and at the same time interacting with a live audience (footnote mukbang bj). Two good examples of Youtube channels that contain review videos of food are Strictly Dumpling by Mikey Chen (footnote) and Mark Wiens. Both channels contain videos where the two men present in a sincere way the food they consume. I find it pleasant to watch these videos and to learn about different types of food. These food videos became the inspiration for my own food video, which became a mix between a Mukbang video and a video from Chen and Wiens. In my video work I consume, in a 'white cube' setting, a Nr. 39 dish that is captured with two cameras.
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| In Search of Perfect Orange turned, for my graduation, in a personal journey that explores the father-son relationship, Chinese food culture and passing on of knowledge. I developed a series of video works that honour my father, his culture and his way of cooking, food is used as a way to connect to my father and the culture I normally belong too. In an attempt to mimic my father, I try to make sustainable versions of the carrot flower and the dish he creates in the video. The last is a reference to Japanese food culture where it is normal to encountered silicone and plastic representatives of food and dishes in windows of restaurants to make it easy for customers to chose the item they want to eat (footnote doc japanology).
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| Nr.39 with Rice will be my graduation project. The project unfolds in two paths. The first part exist out of silicone sculptures I want to produces that represent real existing Nr.39-dishes. Because of the diversity in appearance this will form an interesting collection. The physical appearance of these dishes might look fake, artificial and groose from a western point of view, but the ideas stams/comes from Japanese culture where physical representations of real dishes are a daily view/normal sight/everyday sight. In Western culture we are used to see a written menu. Upon that you decide what to eat. In Asian culture and especially the Japanese culture menus take another form. Often you see at the entrance of Japanse restaurants a cabinet full of objects that represent the food that is served inside. This cabinet is a visual menu and guest that are interested in having food inside the restaurant can see what the menu looks like and can order in advance. ---> write about this more, japanology doc.
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| The second part involves video works where my father will play a keyrole. My parents use to own a Chinese restaurant called Choi Sing in The Hague and my father is from origin a chef. There is unfortunately no documentation left, but they did had a Nr.39 on their menu. For Nr.39 with Rice my father to goes back to a Chinese restaurant and cook a Nr.39 in their kitchen. The procedures of cooking are captured by two cameras, where one captures the overview and the other captures the details. This video is the starting point for 3 more video works, which I call chapters. Chapter 2 is all about the recreation of the dish my father cooked into a silicone sculpture, chapter 3 is a video work thats shows in detail how my father makes a carrot rose and chapter 4 will be transfer of Nr.39 (the dish of my father) from one plate to another mediated through the hands of my parents.
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