Two things that I created at Wesleyan that I want to compare and contrast are a picture of one of my collages and a picture of my sister wearing a mask.
The first one was created in an art class, and the picture of my sister was taken during the pandemic. These two things share the same “genre” as they all reflect changes. In the collage, I cut different pieces of paper from newspapers, magazines, and even school handouts, and I rearranged these fragments into a new picture (a woman’s face).
And for my sister’s photograph, I wanted to show how the world was changed by the pandemic; this global issue affected everyone, no matter of age or location.
The collage shows my artistic skills as it shows how I employed different media and redesigned them into something new. It also shows I can find the possibility of an artifact, which is also why the collage is attractive to me. More importantly, I think my collage is a reflection of how to learn stuff. I enjoy making connections among everything I learn, just like making connections between newspaper and magazine pieces. I love finding the similarities and differences within these things, grouping them together according to a specific feature, and understanding them in a new and creative way. For example, I was in a literature and psychology class last semester. In the literature class, we learned about writings in Asian American communities. In the psychology class, we learned about literature in the 19th and 20th centuries in the US. The way I learned these two classes was to build connections between Asian American literature and culture – thinking about how culture influences literature and how literature can affect the assimilation of Asian Americans into American society.
The photograph of my sister demonstrated my social responsibility. I love to use media, photography, art, or video, to show the influence of social events on individuals’ daily lives. The visual power enhances my storytelling and makes it more persuasive. This aspect is related to my worldview because similar to the previous collage point, I can make connections between individuals and society and portray the connection in a visually creative way.
