Mingcheng Song

Lidar scanning did wonders when it came to creating a mock-up for the exhibition. The 3d model it generated came with fairly accurate measurements, so it was straightforward to gauge the real-life dimensions of flat-works from their default width and height. When I unfurled the printed canvases on the gallery floor, they seemed even larger than I had imagined (using my body as a reference), some reaching two meters, which was, as it turned out, the appropriate scale to fill up the space.

Once the canvas is hung up on a wall, its scale becomes quite flexible. I'm beginning to wonder if the only real difference between large and small works is whether they could be "captured" by the eyes or a camera. Like you would instinctively step towards or away from an image to scale up or down to something "optimal", something that encompasses a "full picture" while retaining enough details. The images were blown up and materialized, but they were still more or less always displayed and imagined in full view. A good painting draws you in because it's a pleasure to enter in and out of the illusion. I think sometimes a good photograph does the same because of the inherent complexity to real world objects that supplemented the picture with juicy details better ingested up-close. Maybe it would be fair to say that the images on display don't possess the level of detail that calls for an inflation in scale. And without the crop of a granular view, the difference in scale between screen and canvas was leveled. But the large prints weren't for nothing either, for one they really raised to the occasion in terms of announcing their presence in the gallery space without overcrowding it, maintaining the proportion that was helped decided during the mock-up phase. Now that I'm thinking about it, if I were to reduce the larger prints to a quarter of its size, not only would it leave much space to be desired, but it would also increase the legwork required to shift from one work to another, thus hindering the flow of the exhibition.

Perhaps another important parameter I have omitted so far is the the idea of "life-sized". How does something portrayed in flat-works compares to its real-life counterpart? The two fences, for example, seemed comfortable being within the ball park of their actually measurements. And the final scale also allowed them to serve as much more convincing display stands for the accessories, which though not illegible, were not that welcoming for the casual glances. Maybe the need to "relax the eyes" would be a signal for there being "enough details", providing a good cause for an upsize. The same argument could also be funded by the mosquitos in Oasis, and the leg hairs in Bond, leaving the pink hammer piece to be the only one that fell short.


By the time I have line up the images to print, there was only two days left until the opening, with the only viable option being the commercial printshop in the area. When I called at first, I said I needed to print some "posters"--the only word I could find to remotely match the quality and scale I was looking for. As it turned out, posters were also a specific method of large-scale printing on a thin film, with adhesive on one side to be mounted onto foam boards or directly onto the surface. Unaware of any alternatives, I was very hesitant. The sample they showed me was a dentist commercial with three very pixelated stock photos, the kind that would definitely make you question the legitimacy of the practice advertised. Also because of the flimsiness of the film, it would be impossible to hold up the prints with screws and clips without it curling and creasing. I was not a fan of foam boards either, thinking its addition would call back to some community bulletin. Plus how would you get foam boards that size from Shanghai to home?

After a while, I was finally able to get some of my intentions across, and the printshop suggested I try uv-printing. Delightfully, the booklet of samples were made of materials much sturdier than the poster. In the end I landed on the plain-weaved canvas. When I saw the final product the next morning, most of my worries with the image quality dissipated. I didn't really have any ideas of what prints this size should optimally look like, but I also didn't notice a drop in resolution other than the micro lighting artifacts introduced by the surface texture of the canvas.

The place where uv printing revealed its shortcomings was the colors. For the most part, there wasn't a detectable discrepancy  between the prints and my original files. And I did expect a loss of vibrancy when the image was no longer composed of lit-up pixels. However, it was really made clear to me that the machine struggled with its range of blacks. Window Composition was completely subsumed by patches of dumb, uniformed black tone. And the hammer beneath the ribbon-bond fences almost disappeared in the shadows.


I really enjoyed making the mosquito. It was like a puzzle to piece together, extracting informations from all kind of reference pictures, fill in the blanks (which there was a lot of in the mid-section where everything was mushed together) with a bit of imagination, all the while trying to maintain good typology. The whole workflow is so much like sculpting with clay. Though in clay, what you see is what you get. And with vertices, edges and faces, you are always negotiating between the abstraction of the low-poly base mesh and its subdivided, smoothed-over outcome. Despite having to constantly give input in order to progress, modeling, especially one aimed towards likeness, allowed a degree of auto-piloting. Same with printmaking and crocheting, it's a great opportunity to kick back and sink into the rhythm while feeling productive in the end. Taken at face value, the final model was admittedly more akin to a cartoon, but it's also a well-stretched canvas primed for finer details, until it ripens into a "industry-ready" product.

Finding a comfort zone was simultaneously alluring and dangerous. Most of the time, more work doesn't yield better outcomes. Still images aren't nearly as demanding of its assets as an animated clip, they are facades, only putting their best faces forward. Images are also made of stable pixels, whose capacity for storing details is only finite. If I were to be result oriented, the necessity of good typology would be called into question, since there's hardly a need for deformation. In the end, it didn't matter if the ornaments on the window bar were meticulously made. It surprises me how much the digital tools relies on impressions despite no longer having limitations to image resolution. In painting, you would always start with broad strokes, an unfocused vision, and a rough map for where everything would eventually fall into place. It's a stage where the canvas is full of potential, bursting with energy, and often times, never quite surpassed. Similarly, as a practice of building from ground up, digital imaging should benefit from an easing into the details. For the texturing workflow, I think this implies a departure from the high-res, ready-made materials, in search for something with more noise and unpredictability. I can also see the replacement of volumes with planes, a way of looking at other forms of image assemblage such as collage. After all, who's to tell if the fog is generated volumetrically or just with an image overlay? The options are wide open, and the disbelief in realism could be suspended, it's up to me to familiarize myself with all the tools that's available in order to work more effectively, and efficiently.


Ever since I got out of school, I've grown thoroughly disinterested in explaining "concepts", aka "what it is about". I recognize that it is a fair question, an attempt to get on the wavelength of the author, especially when someone is not sure about how to access the work themselves. The best answer I could give, for this set of images would be, it's about the way it looks. How it's staged, and how one thing appears next to another. In my mind, the merits of these pictures lie within their aesthetic qualities in conversation with the medium, and their meaning is built on a certain kind of visual literacy entrenched in photographs of art-objects. It's not a game of translation but of association, where the currency is image not words.

I'm not object to language and narratives. The reason I felt my jaw wired shut when I heard "what is it about" was partially the lack of practice. For a month I've been looking and drawing and modeling, but never did I put what I was doing into words. During the time of my little critique circle, I could sense myself becoming more and more comfortable describing the works. It was then I was able to excavate small pieces of thought that drove images forward. I wanted a certain tension that's becoming increasingly stranded by the turbulence beneath (the analogy I gave then was--imagine you are on a night walk and club music is playing on your headphones, it makes you want to burst into dance, but you are fighting every instinct not to). It felt like I was working backwards, recalling experiences filtered through the pictures--a personal reading of some sort, separate from the process of making. In the end, I'd much rather not have an authoritative voice than to feign a misguided understanding.  

Despite my insistence on images being self-sufficient, for unassuming eyes, there's nothing to denote them being any more special than a random frame in our perpetually visual world. Maybe this concern just suggests the failure on my part for not producing images that truly stand out. But can you see how easily something so heavily reliant on its visual can be dismissed as farcical and unproductive? It could be the ptsd from the constant grilling from my parents over what the "value" of my art is, and what good it does for the world. I think if I could just expand the images into animated clips or stories, not only would it be a natural progression for the working environment of blender, it would also better equip the works with the tools of self-advocation.

The six image prompts presented at the panel.

In 2001, Susan Sontag joined E.O. Wilson and Roger Penrose to discuss images and meaning in science at MIT. The three panelists were asked to compose ten minuets worth of free response to a set of images, depicting various scientific phenomenons. Roger Penrose went first, unsure of the assignment. He went over each image, briefly describing their supposed themes, and tossed on top a few words of his own reflection in that general field. Following Roger Penrose, Susan Sontag pointed out the way in which he was talking about those images was effectively treating them as representatives. The picture of an atomic bomb reminded him of the ethical responsibility of scientists, the picture of earth rising as seen from the moon reminded him of questions of space travel and so on. In each case, the images became the conduits where the eyes lingered very little. She continued to add that, in fact, the images' celebrity, as well as their lack of connection to each other, exactly encouraged the sort of shallow thinking that diverted attention from the visual--the quality that separated images from text.

Susan Sontag really stuck a chord with me here. When I first saw the images, they really just seemed like they were picked right from my middle school science text book. You can't say that they aren't compiling images, the kind of ubiquity they achieve even among the "science illiterates" is precisely because of their appeals, such as their comprehensiveness, precision, and novelty at the time. Maybe such effectiveness is to the detriment of an image's longevity, especially when it's designed as an aid to some abstract ideas. When you get the point across the first time, no more "work"(looking) is subsequently required to communicate. It is then the image becomes a representative of the thing itself.

I'm trying to think about the implication it has when an image isn't didactic or illustrative but instead is operating in relation to other images. A chimera of sorts that's capable of channeling certain responses but is difficult to name. Maybe I just inadvertently described something more adjacent to "aesthetic" or "style" in the process of image-making. In a recent application, I introduced myself as a storyteller, and now I'm beginning to think about what it means to construct a narrative through a still image. Does it lose its potency when a reader thumbs through all its pages? To think the man in white shirt with arms raised at gun point in Third of May, to think the horror in the half severed head in Judith Beheading Holofernes, they draw you to relive the moment every time. Perhaps snippets and narratives are not one and the same, the former prompts you to ask questions within the image itself. There are more that I'm struggling to elaborate at the moment, but I'm certainly more alert to how and what I'm sampling in an image. I don't want to be bogged down by having to justify or imbue meanings to each and every source, that seems entirely like another style of working. However, I'm slow to get a handle  on the chemistry between the many decontextualized ingredients that often find their way to my screen. It seems like that chemistry, a certain emotional charge, is core to the composition, though I end up telling the more literal tale when approached with the dreadful question of what is it about.

“For all that, I recognized Akira with no difficulty...I would appear to him no more than an intimidating silhouette.”

I felt stuffy putting down When We Were Orphans. Great leaps in time without landing on a general sense of resolution really induced the horror that's instilled in me ever since I was a child. "Don't waste time"--I can hear mother yapping in my ear. In truth, a great motto to live by, but most of the time it just bashes you for the time already "wasted". To think that for all his life, Christopher has been holding on to this tremendous purpose, and for it to turn out to be somewhat of a Sisyphean boulder, really crushes the idea of a competent, respectable detective that he so insistently constructed for himself. I see many parallels in the story, like the old detective, and Sarah's Sir husband, both accomplished, but somehow short of a legacy that could withstand the test of time. The Sir husband senses something fleeting, and tries to capture it with one last push, but falls short. In a similar fashion, after a farcical reveal to Christopher's magnum opus, all that I know about him seems to fizzle out. Despite him uncovering the truth and eventually reuniting with his mother, Christopher loses momentum and drops out of the projected trajectory. Maybe he was doomed from the start, because whenever the idea of rescuing his parents in a blaze of glory comes up in the story, it is never meant to be taken seriously. The maybe-Akira has cautioned us to brace for impact, but Christopher's journey up to that point has been a complete fever dream, a world where the unlikely becomes the inevitable.

So was it all a waste? Christopher probably won't agree. It just seems like it because I was too focused on his personal narrative to notice how each of the characters are trampled by the historical current. Strong-willed like Ms Hemmings couldn't foresee herself being held captive at a prisoner's camp. Their collective joys and sorrows gather like specks of sand to give shape to the hurricane that is war, which in the end will also die down to a whisper of wind, telling the story of a distant past.  

One of the few privileges that being a "high risk individual" (meaning I had just entered mainland from overseas in the past week) provided was the conveniences in the airport. As a result of the special check-in counter, designated lounge and security queue. Up until I began boarding, there was someone by my side to escort. I have to admit that it felt great to be on autopilot in an otherwise very stressful setting, I liked to be attended to, although for not exactly complimentary reasons. It was also the first time in my life to board an airplane before anyone else, even before those flying business class. I always didn't care for standing in line before boarding's called, and going through the final checkpoint before anyone thought to get up from their seats, I'd like to imagine that landing on me were some heated glances casted by those most eager to board first. And the most dramatic part was yet to come! When the plane finally landed, people quickly unloaded their luggages and formed a packed line along the aisle. The flight attendant leaned over and told me to wait until everyone else got out. I nodded, thinking that would likely be the case anyway since I'm seated all the way in the back. That's until after the voice overhead had stumbled its way through what must have been over forty "medium and high risk cities" in China, I heard, "Passenger in 30F please exit the plane first". The flight attendant turned to me once again, apologetically asking me make my exit, while the other crew members began trying to clear a way in the busy aisle. The bulk of me that I was, carrying a backpack, a duffle bag, plus a ridiculously large water bottle that's definitely not worth the hassle to transport from all the way across the globe, inched towards the front along the now obstacle course of luggages. I could hear the gears turning in people's head: who is this person and how come he gets to go first? The answer might be quite obvious to most, and some annoyance might turn into (largely unfounded) fear after they have figured it out, a small part of me still imagined that I'm some sort of celebrity traveling incognito--a totally nonsensical thought and a little grotesque even, but amusing nonetheless.

I really didn't hate the extensive and laborious steps of living in quarantine. It's a period of time where very few decisions have to be made, and that freed up my mind to be productive, sometimes creative. I was able to maintain a week's streak in Duolingo after who knows how long. Tomorrow I will be dismissed and reintegrate as a normal, non-contagious citizen, marking the end of a path to a long missed home. The prospect of future is ever so daunting, so maybe I should take solace when I can.

I was first prompted to visit Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros by a snapshot of its set, where a large, horned head emerges from the void and casts an imposing shadow on the empty stage. And as it turns out, the play calls for an even more dramatic display, which contains a multitude of rhinoceros heads increasingly crowding the stage while more and more citizens are converted to the cult of beasts. I was a little disappointed that the transformations weren't depicted with more grit. Most of them happens without a witness. One moment there was an old couple living in the apartment next door, and the next emerge from behind the door two rhinoceroses. And even for the one that happens before our eyes, it's almost entirely supplemented by the protagonist's confounded descriptions, not capable of fully grasping (maybe nor was he given time to) what his friend is undergoing until the transformation is complete.

Over the years, Rhinoceros has become Ionesco's most famous play for the very literal allegory of "Rhinoceritis" to the rise of Nazi Germany, which in many ways has limited the play's reading by subjecting the events to an irrefutable moral code. The narrative then becomes simple as the hero of the story choosing not to succumb to the prevailing evil. Funnily enough, the arbitrariness of the rhinoceros as the face of evil allows anyone to slot in what they deem appropriate in their believe system, and embody the tortured hero in the story. In YouTube, if you search for the 1973 film adaptation of the same name,  in the comment section, you will find evidences of anti-vaxxers identifying with the protagonist, and lamenting the "consequences of holding onto your individuality" (in a time of global pandemic).

However, if you take a more literal approach to the text, what's Berenger's reasons for being against rhinoceroses? He seems to have a hard time articulating it other than something of a gut feeling. What makes a rhinoceros an agent of evil other than it seemingly replaces and therefore erases the human that once was? In fact, the argument no longer stands once you see the beast's subjectivity as a continuation of the human pre-transformation (like Mrs Boeuf did), or regard the act as a conscious choice (like Dudard did). Characters on the verge of transformation, even Berenger himself to an extent, experience a shift in perspective and express desires to be made a rhinoceros. As Nasrullah Mambrol articulated in their analysis, the story really is about the inability to change, and not of the battle of two diametrically opposing sides.