User:10000BL/H4-Descriptions of work

H4: Descriptions of previous/ongoing work

Being Yellow - 2010-2013

Being Yellow is a series of photo works were I play with my identity and ethnicity. Born in the Netherlands out of Chinese immigrants, but raised by Dutch people, I always carried a conflict in my identity. In the series I try to comment on things that happened or occurred in my life and magnify it with the color yellow.

The works from Being Yellow feels to me as a turning point in my artistic career. It gave me the feeling that the ideas I have and the translation of them into physical works made a certain sense to the person I am. The main part of Being Yellow is photo based works that include comments and jokes about my background. What is also included is the repetition of images. A certain expression of myself in a self-portrait is used in other printing techniques. My head replaced another head on a Chinese hell bank note, money that is being burned at funerals and commemoration of dead for ancestors, and is printed with a Riso-machine in an edition of 10000. The same head is also replacing the head of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a picture. This new image is then 169 times duplicated and turned into a 13x13 grid printed on fine-art paper. The exploitation of the image of my head is something I want to continue with in the future.

Being Yellow is inspired by Yinka Shonibare's photo serie Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) where he features himself as a dandy in various scenes (Kuiper, 2015), the early photo works of Anthony Goicolea (1999-2004, site), where he depicts himself multiple times in staged scenes and the works of Singaporean performance artist Lee Wen. Lee kis best known for his work Journey of a Yellow Man (1992) in which he paints his body with yellow paint. 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.

Also conceptually my works looks like that of Lee. Lee is born in Singapore, but when he was studying in London he was often seen as a mainland Chinese. He does speaks Mandarin and knows bits of the Chinese culture but is not an expert. At the same time 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 my work and his work to use the color yellow.

TE KOOP

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. In this project I take photos of carefully arranged spaces 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 choose bikes and pieces of furniture because the hold a certain size and second they are common objects for sale on commodity markets. The details in the photos are of importance and these details range from little hints to my past, previous works I made or are chosen because they fit the colors of the other items in the image. The composition is finalized by including myself for the photo in the set in such a way that it might be difficult for viewers to notice. The final photo together with a short description of the object are then turned into advertisements. Intentionally I prohibited potential buyers from placing bids. I also did not include my phone number or my address in the advertisement. Instead, the only way potential buyers could reach me was by sending an e-mail.

The advertisements serve as a bait for potential buyers. I speak of bait because the intention of the advertisements is not to actually sell the objects I, instead the advertisements are online to investigate how people respond and communicate on commodity markets. The advertisements look like any other advertisement on a commodity market. That means, it contains an image of the object I offer and a short, minimal description of the product.

For TE KOOP I made fake accounts on commodity markets in different countries around the world. Specifically I stated in the accounts that I was living in cities like New York, London and Berlin. The countries I infiltrated were choses because I mastered the language of the respective country. When this was not the case translators were helping me to reply the potential buyers. To reply is important because it is my intention to stall and to keep the conversation going on. I do this by answering just the question a potential buyer asks. For example, when asked about the dimensions I just give the dimensions, nothing else. By doing this the potential buyer needs to ask at least one more question that of availability or if he or she can come by to collect the object. The minimal information I give back might also serve as a sign that this advertisement might not be as real as it looks. Sometimes I asked the potential buyer a question too, to spice up or twist the conversation. I might for example ask about a potential buyer's girlfriend when he himself mentions a girlfriend in his initial question. The conversation usually ends when the potential buyer aks to come by and collect the object. My answer to this question is that I promised the object to another potential buyer or that it is already sold. No potential buyer was then mad or disappointed on me, the could only blame themselves not be more aggressive (spot on) in the conversation we had. In any case I tried avoid situations where the potential buyer could get angry on me.

A positive consequence of the infiltration of different countries is that it gives an insight how people use and communicate on commodity markets. The amount and length of messages, the use of language and object preferences were some of the things that came out t be different for each country. This is something I did not foresee when I started the project.

The advertisements 'raised' hundreds of responses. Mostly the responses are about the object I offered. This counts for 95% of the responses. In 5% of the cases people noticed that the advertisement is not what it seems to be. Rarely people noticed me from the start, it mostly happened that people became suspicious after numerous e-mails send back and forth with no progression in obtaining the desired object. TE KOOP is a project that is about the (lack of use of) senses. Online the only senses you can use and must trust are your eyes. That means when it comes to advertisements online I expected people to look very good if they can trust the advertisement by its appearance. The project proved that this is most of the time not the case.

(What I hoped/wanted is) TE KOOP exist of two parts. One is making the actual photo and second the performance part online. When making the photo I had to keep in mind how potential buyers would perceive the photo when turned into an advertisement and to which extend my physical appearance is visible or not. Too visible would for example fail the specific advertisement. This is off course difficult to conclude, because what is exactly a failure? Is that no responses at all or the fact that the object won't sell? The latter is not applicable in my project, because I never sold the object listed. In my project it was all about the responses and the more the better. Because of that I was very conservative in the position I took in the photos of the objects. In 95% of the responses it was all about the object. Of those 95% I don't know how many actually saw me, but ignored that in the conversations. In 5% of the responses people saw me from the beginning or after a while during our conversation, but I don't know how many people saw me, but never responded with a message.

The different advertisements raised different amounts of responses. First, this might had to do with product preferences in general, racing bikes were more popular overall then for example a sofa. Second, differences also emerged because of the popularity of commodity markets in the countries I infiltrated. For several years commodity markets are in The Netherlands an established medium, yet for China this is somehow different. Third, an advertisement of a bike raised less responses when bikes in the respective country are less in use over another country. And final, economic status of the inhabitants of a country might have been influenced the amount of responses/the project. When I was performing online in 2013 significant more responses came from Spain on advertisements of sofas. In 2013 it was crisis in Spain.

inspirations

TE KOOP is inspired by....... artist+ref

Being Yellow figures (figureert)/comes back in my TE KOOP-project as a background object.- places at TE KOOP

What succeeded

What followed from it

note:

what is the differences between a pic, image, photo?

use the word Elicit (The advertisements function as bait and elicit responses)

Project: Unboxing

Unboxing is essentially filming yourself opening boxes, showing what is inside and uploading it to platforms like Youtube. The first unboxing video came from Yahoo Tech in 2006 and showed the unboxing of a Nokia E61 (wiki). Currently unboxing is a well established genre on Youtube and and the videos are made by people all around the world.

Unboxing is inspired by 'haul videos', the showing of purchased items in a shopping spree and has it origin in the tech/gadget world (art3). Usually unboxing videos show the opening of boxes and the items inside. Vloggers give their opinion about the products unboxed and explain how they work. Basically everything that is for sale, is proably unboxed on youtube (art1). Unboxing videos attracts millions of viewers all around the world. It is a lucrative business for both Vloggers and manufratuarls of products and good. Vloggers earn money by the monitored number of views. For manufracturars it is interesting because their products gets cheap exposure compared to advertisements of themselves. Manufractuars sometimes work together with certain vloggers who are popular and have a lot of goodwill among their viewers. It is then interesting for manufractuars to have their products inside the script (art3).

There are several reasons from different angles why unboxing is such a popular genre in current days. From a practical way viewers get a preview of items and all their belongings. It gives an honest peak and information at commercial products, they might want to buy themselves. On the emotional level unboxing videos are enjoyable to watch (art2). According to Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Center, unboxing videoa feed our primal curiosity and desire to know what is hidden inside something. Unboxing is also in essence not new, other examples of unknown sealed or wrapped objects existed thorughout time. Think of surprise gagdets in bags of chips and gumball machines (art4). For young viewers unboxing might acts as an cognitive experience and a reasurance mechanism. Children like to hear a story of and over again even if they know the outcome already. Maybe this counts also for unboxing (art4).

For my project Unboxing I decided to work again with the medium of commodity markets. Instead of being the seller as in TE KOOP, I decided to be the buyer. For my project Unboxing I wanted to buy a booklet full of post stamps. On commodity markets you can find numerous ads offering all kinds of stamps so it was not difficult for me to find candidate booklets. The questions I raised in this project were first if I was able to convince the seller to send the package in an unconventional way than usual and second if this package then would be accepted by the Dutch postal company PostNL.

Part of making the deal with the seller was that I asked the seller not to put the booklet in an envelop or box, but to put tape on the sides of the booklet that could fall open. This means that the booklet was closed by tape at the top, right side and bottom. On the cover I asked them to write down my name and address and also to put the stamps there. By doing this I change the meaning of the object booklet. Instead of being a booklet, it became a carrier/container with an object in side. A booklet of stamps was sent this way to me. When I received the booklet I made a setting where I was going to unbox the package. This was handling was shot with two cameras, one frontal and focused on my hands handling the package, the other from above with an angle. The video ends with me showing the content of the book. Aside the video I made a booklet that resembled the original booklet, yet the content was different. The stamp were replaced by the e-mail conversation I had the original seller. The video and false booklet were presented together.

Rejected

In 2010 I went to a reunion of my former elementary school Vest. School Vest was moving to a new location and the reunion was part of the farewell process. The school set up an exhibition of old school photos that they collected throughout the years. Clearly they didn't had everybody's picture, but it gave a good insight in the history of the school.

School photos are portrait pictures that are made yearly. In the United States of America they are know as yearbook photos. The day of the shoot is important, I can remember that my parents were informed in advance about the photographer's coming(?) in the hope that parents will take special attention to the appearance of their children. The intention of school photos is to show happy, smiling children. On the day itself the photographer takes the children's portrait picture as well as classroom pictures and pictures together with your siblings. This yearly ritual produces an interesting document of a person's early development.

I personally never liked the day the photographer came to take my picture, yet when I saw my pictures in the exhibition it was kind of pleasant. I asked the janitor if it was possible to digitise my own pictures for my personal archive. He allowed me to digitise my pictures and gave the whole collection compressed in three archive folders (boxes?) to me after the exhibition was finished. When I opened the boxes I immediately discovered pictures I didn't saw at the exhibition. The pictures that were excluded from the exhibition were all marked with a pen. A closer inspection revealed that the children on those pictures had actually two pictures in the collection. A marked one and a picture without the mark. My assumption is that the marked picture was made before the unmarked picture and that the photographer at the time decided to take another picture. When the marked-unmarked pictures are placed next to each other you can imagine why the photographer made the decision to take a second picture. In some cases the marked pictures show technical failures/mistakes by the photographer, in other cases the child blinked his or her eyes or showed other facial deviations that are not appreciated in school photos. What is most remarkable about the collection of marked-unmarked pictures is that in many cases it is hard to tell why there is a second picture. From the perspective of a photographer we can defend that the photographer's intuition here plays a role; the decisive moment, the desired result, was not captured the first time. Yet the retake of a portrait picture that is being taken in an artificial environment is equal to killing spontaneity of a person. You lose a certain innocence and a child is forced to present itself in a word that is dictated by the preferences of adults. A closer inspection indeed shows less joy and passion in the unmarked picture.

The collection of school photos found in the archive of school Vest comes from a time that photography was analog. Because of that photographers could only see the result of the pictures after they developed the film. Contact sheets were made to get a quick glimpse of the result. The photographer then applied certain marks to indicate the good one, flaws or improvement. In this light the marks on the school photos makes sense, the question is why are they saved?

The collection of marked-unmarked pictures give a good insight in what school photography used to be. I speak of past tense because since the introduction of the digital camera in the 1990s (ref wiki) many aspects of photography changed. From there on taking photos was not restricted by the number of photos you could take with that film nor its development and production costs. By the year 2000 digital photography replaced analog photography as the main medium. The digital camera with its build-in LCD-screen provides an instant feedback of the picture taken upon we decide to take another one or not. From this moment on I imagine that pictures with a mark of a pen went extinct, yet when photography was still analogue the marked picture must have been prevalent and it is very likely that every school around the world had in potential the same collection as the one I discovered at school Vest.

The collection revealed 101 pairs of marked and unmarked pictures and eight group pictures of siblings. This total amount accounted for less than 10% of the collection School Vest had, but gave an good insight of how a photographer used (or miss used) pictures of children. It shows us the flaws the photographer had in his technique, but more importantly shows us how a child is not accepted as being a child. My intention with the collection is to make a book. In 2015 I made the first draft of the book with the work title Rejected. The size of the book is A5 (148x210mm). In the book you see the both the marked picture (the rejected one) and the accepted picture without the mark. The two picture are in one eyesight visible when you open the book. Together they form a spread. The accepted picture is shown according the size of a school photo (50x35mm), the rejected picture is a little approximately A5 (148x210mm).

The marking of pictures and thereby deciding how a person should like no matter what reason can be perceived as an aggressive act. In terms of failing photos can fail when the camera and its technique is failing. Yet the failing of a picture can in my opinion never be blamed on the person of whom the picture is taken. I say this in light of the nostalgic proof of an existence a photos is and the special moment, the decisive moment (Cartier) a photo in my opinion always captures. The changing or altering of portrait pictures raised recently controversy in the Shelby Baum's case. Baum, a student from Wasatch High School in Heber City, Utah found her portrait picture being adjusted in the yearbook. In the original picture Baum was wearing a V-neack shirt revealing her tatoo. In the photo published in the yearbook her V-neck was changed into a square-neck shirt that covered her tatoo (newsflash, 2014 & art 3). According to a statement from Wasatch High students need to comply according a certain dresscode that carries out modesty and this dresscode is being explicitly comunnicated to the students during the photoshoot in the form of a sign. It also stated that when students don't wear clothes according to the dresscode their pictures could be subject to editing (art3&5). Students instead claim that there were no signings that said anything about a dresscode and that they wore those clothes involved regularly to school without any consent. Multiple photos and all from girls were adjusted, yet this was done inconsistently where some girl's pictures wearing tanktops were allowed and others not (art 5&7). The girls involved felt singled out, judged and humilated (art4). The girls involved are supported by the Rape Recovery Center. Mullen from RRC says that our culture and the people in power shame young women into thinking they must dress according to a certain way that doesn't help the self-image of women. It reinforces a general theme in society that women must be controlled and protected so as not to inflame male sexual appetites (art 8). The case of Wasatch High School shows that alteration of pictures have huge impact on the image women have of themselves and how they are perceived by a certain society.

The collection is also for another level relevant that is the decrease of yearbooks. In the United States portrait pictures are part of the tradition of called yearbook. A yearbook is a book with portrait pictures and pictures of subgroups within a school or college that comes together with all kinds of written background of the school and its students. It is a ritual for graduating making and getting a yearbook (art 1). Since 1995 the printing of yearbook dropped from 2400 to a 1000 in 2010 (art 2). The decrease in interest is caused by rising publishing costs (art 2) and the upcoming of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram(art2). Though yearbook publishers try to incorporate new technologies that go outside of the printed book (QR-code, URL, websites and mobile apps) the future of the yearbook doesn't look good. The impact of social media which means that lives have a place to exist online makes printed media less needed/urgent. The decrease in yearkbooks and thus the making of portrait pictures is relevant to my collection of portrait pictures. I expect that it is becoming less likely to have your portrait picture being taken within the walls of a school. Social media platforms and the rise in use of digital cameras in multiple forms makes the need to have your picture taken by a professional photographer together with the cost of purchase less desirable.

The look at the collection of rejected and the case of Wasatch High School give an unease feeling. This is enlarged by an issue of Useful Photography that is all about a missing database from the National Missing Persons Helpline (NMPH) (nook, 2003). When I looked into the magazine without knowing that these people are missing, I perceived the pictures differently then when I looked at them with the consent the people were missing. It became hard to look at them. The meaning of the images in my collection change also when you see that there are two versions.

Tinder Aesthetics

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/).

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Graduation project: Nr. 39 with Rice

Nr.39 with Rice is a project that has its origin in/from an event from Holland Got Talent in 2013. In that (bewuste) episode Dutch jury member Gordon asked Chinese contestant Xiao Wang if he is going to sing the song 'Nr.39 with Rice'. The remark is rich in many ways. It refers to 1) Gordon himself and the way he perceives (Chinese) food (as being a number) and 2) the extensive menus Chinese restaurants often have. From another point of view Gordon's remark can be seen as a racist comment and questions the postion of Chinese people in Dutch society. The event sparked an international debate and was focused on the possible racist comment it held. Several news media covered the topic and a group of Chinese people came with a counter respons by having a website called 'nummer39metrijst' that advertised a 39% discount for the Nr.39-dish in 39 different Chinese restaurants all around the Netherlands. Among the 39 restaurants Chinese Muur in Hilversum offered a special edition for the number 39. For this occasion Nr.39 was 'Gebakken Gordon' (Fried Gordon, ref “RTV Noord-Holland” te gast bij Chinese Muur Hilversum, youtube). The website is supported by several Dutch-Chinese organisation such as Vereniging Chinese Horeca Ondernemers (VCHO), Chinese Radio & TV (CRTV) and Chinese Politieke Integratie & Participatie (CPIPF). The website, the Chinese-Dutch organisations and the 39 Chinese restaurants involved in the offer feels to me as a solid respons supporting the majority of Chinese-Dutch people in the Netherlands.

The original event between Gordon and Wang, the media attention it evoked and the offer in the form of a website provided me rich material to work with. In my project 'Nr.39 with Rice' the basic question I investigate is what exactly is a Nr.39 and how does it look like. The first step I did in the project was to collect menus from Chinese restaurants that were advertising/serving a dish that was listed as number 39. This is not so difficult because a menu of a Chinese restaurant usually contains more than 100 dishes. I collected a dozen of menus from Chinese restaurant, no discrimination was made between different types of restaurants and also not if the were a fusion of two different kitchens (Chinese-Indonesisch, Chinese-Surinaams, of dim sum restaurant). One menu in particular was interesting because the restaurant involved the Nr.39-dish from the menu. I don't think they deleted the dish, they deleted the number.

The second step in my project was taking photos of the Nr.39-dish from different Chinese restaurant and research if there is a structure in the quantified system of the menus. Most menus are divided in specific sections like starters, soup and lunch. And if you think about an Italian menu and the pizza that is listed as the first one than it is always the Margeritha pizza. To make this series I went out to eat at Chinese restaurants and ordered the Nr.39-dish. When it was presented I took a photograph with my Iphone before consuming it. The apearrances of the dish differed hugely among the restaurants showing no sign of equality(?)/comparison in the dishes. The wide variety of the dishes is not something that was total unexpected. The relatively high number of the 39 makes it also not easy to see a comparison among all. This might have been more easier with a lower number. However the diversity among the dishes is very high ranging from a small dish to a large dish, from a ver refined dish to a very condensed dish. Somehow I expected a little more structure in the menus of Chinese restaurants.

The third step in my project was to film myself eating a Nr.39-dish. For this video I brought a Nr.39 dish to a studio setting where I filmed with two cameras the process of me eating the food. The first camera showed an overview of me eating the food, the second camera was solely focused on the food and showed details of me picking up the food with cutlery from the plate. In the final edit of the video you see an interplay between these two shots, going from overview to detail till there is no food left anymore. As a follow up I want to film and consume Nr 39's in restaurant themselves.

This work is inspired by a phenomenom from Korea called Mukbang (translates as 'Eating Broadcast'). Pracitsioners of Mukbang are called Broadcast Jockeys and these BJ's eat food, make comments about the food and interact with an online audience. It is a million dollar business where BJ's earn money through balloons (rewarding points) by viewers. The food the usually consume in front of the live cam are take aways in huge quantities. Some BJ's choose to cook their on food instead and show the process of cooking and consuming it to their fans. Mukbang is broadcasted in a homey environment showing many household items and stuffed animals in the background.

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.

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.

In the graduation show the video works are individually presented on 4 panels that float in the space. Though chapter 1 is a guide for the other chapters, I believe the video can be seen seperately and interchangely. The sculptures are presented on peddlestoles and are also floating in the space.

- self-evaluation

What is it? [descriptions of work (from previous) ]

What did you want?

What succeeded?

What followed from it?

Why did you do it?

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hikaru-cho-its-not-what-it-seems