Re-Place
Altas is the first project I did in RISD. At that time I had only been in America for a month and there was a lot for me to adjust to and take in. This assignment was designed for us to explore the city and be acquainted with our schoolmates (at least I think it was) by completing a series of tasks.
Through the process of content collection, I came to realize my inadequacy in the English language: I perceived Roman types as images instead of understanding what they signified. This incident gave me the idea of using only images to construct my section in the project. It was my exposure to this new context that led to this shift.
One of the project tasks led me to find a familiar manga in Brown library. Vagabond was a manga that I had often read as a teenager. This time, however, the manga was printed in its original Japanese language, one that I do not understand. Again, the recognizable becomes unfamiliar within different contexts. Since the whole section was presented without any text, I borrowed the classic visual language of comic books—the talking boxes. These visually dramatic text boxes communicate spontaneously with each other. They are then overlaid on top of images I had collected, eliciting a visual conversation from the compositional construct.
My section is thus created to be recognized and not read.
Altas is the first project I did in RISD. At that time I had only been in America for a month and there was a lot for me to adjust to and take in. This assignment was designed for us to explore the city and be acquainted with our schoolmates (at least I think it was) by completing a series of tasks.
Through the process of content collection, I came to realize my inadequacy in the English language: I perceived Roman types as images instead of understanding what they signified. This incident gave me the idea of using only images to construct my section in the project. It was my exposure to this new context that led to this shift.
One of the project tasks led me to find a familiar manga in Brown library. Vagabond was a manga that I had often read as a teenager. This time, however, the manga was printed in its original Japanese language, one that I do not understand. Again, the recognizable becomes unfamiliar within different contexts. Since the whole section was presented without any text, I borrowed the classic visual language of comic books—the talking boxes. These visually dramatic text boxes communicate spontaneously with each other. They are then overlaid on top of images I had collected, eliciting a visual conversation from the compositional construct.
My section is thus created to be recognized and not read.
