How to survive, living in rosy glass bubbles, 2018

This work is one of my first 3-dimensional artworks, which was created in the first year. The concept behind the work is to express the scenario of living under the expectations that other people have toward us. 

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The main part of this work is the sculpture of a human form attached diagonally to the square frame, which were made from foam board painted black. The human form was intentionally created in a cubism style to imitate a shadow's characteristics: illusory and confusing. The square frame represents how one always has to behave in a certain way to be seen as "good enough" or "well-mannered" by other people and the society that they are living in. Yet, the unclear form of the shadow indicates that those good behaviours were in fact pretentious, imitated actions. There are plain CDs at the 4 corners of the frame, which were arranged facing toward the shadow at the centre, mimicking the image of other people's eyes watching and waiting to catch any flaw that is going to be made. The reflective feature of the CDs was also used to replicate mirrors, which also means that not only the others are watching the shadow but the shadow itself is also keeping an eye on its own behaviours. The reason the shadow was attached diagonally to the frame was because it cannot fit into the width of the frame, which was another attempt to create a sense of how inadequate and unfitting one's feeling in their own community. 

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The main sculpture was installed with glass pieces hanged to look like they are bubbles "floating" around. The variety in colours of these glass bubbles gives the whole installation a fantasied and ideal image of how an appropriate human should be, how we all want to be seen in the most well-prepared, organised moments, how we only want to show other people our good sides and hide away the bad. 

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Despite all the dreamy, colourful sense in the installation, both the main sculpture and the glass bubbles were created using fragile materials. The foam board that was used to build the shadow and the frail-looking frame is soft, bendy, and easy to deform, while the glass material of the bubbles can be shattered by a lightest impact. Behind that whole fantasy of a flawless human being, it is actually just pretentious, unrealistic images that can collapse at any moment, and one's behaviours can actually be shifted or changed, depend on the environment around them.