Artwork 03: Liu Kang-Inspired Artwork Assignment

As continued from after the Liu Kang Exhibition in the previous post, this post is going to show the development of my work :)

At beginning, I was stuck with an artist's block and I was not sure of what to do, as I personally felt no attachment to any of his works. However, in terms of subject matter, I was decided on doing dance. Since we went to view the Liu Kang exhibition, I decided to break down and analyse Liu Kang's style to see which aspect I was going to emulate, and hopefully find my missing link to the project. Below was my main guiding theory in doing my mindmap board.

This is a full picture of my board...

As you can see, I categorised it into media, colour, composition, technique subject matter, and to sum up, my final decision about how I would be going ahead with my project.
This was my breakdown for media...

...subject matter...

...colour...

 ...composition...

 ...technique...

 and my final decision about what I would be doing.

As you can see, I was actually most moved by Liu Kang's self-portrait.

It told a story and it was a self-portrait containing much emotion despite its simplicity. Also, I wanted to emulate his self-portrait as my previous self-portraits were only meant for the building up of technique in using different media, but it held no true value for me. I wanted to do a self-portrait that held and contained my own emotion and thoughts, one that I would have closer attachment to.

In the picture above, it shows what I wanted to achieve through this first board of research on Liu Kang as I was fully aware many other of my classmates would generally use this research board to provide background information of Liu Kang, which I personally felt was rather redundant in this case, other than to gain more marks for providing information and having done some sort of research for the sake of just researching.  Instead, I decided I was going to do a personal take on my own board by providing things from my own perspective, "defining (define) Liu Kang's style for myself".
The second board was supposed to be 'starting points':

In which i arranged the sequence of my project planning from square one onto the final piece.
Before we even visited the Liu Kang exhibition, we were told that we were to do this Liu kang artpiece and thus many of us searched online for cultural icons in Singapore, however I was always more interested in actual human forms rather than some architecture or inanimate object. As mentioned before, I wanted to do something based on dance. As we quickly needed to do a collage to be used as an experimental design for some printmaking, I then rushed to just search for pictures that could represent dance in Singapore as a cultural mine. Below is a picture of the four pictures I had previously used to make the collage.

I simply drew a collage of these four pictures using the method of cross-hatching on a piece of paper the same size as the piece of plastic we were eventually going to use for the printmaking, around an A5 size. From there, we all scratched our individual designs onto the plastic piece. It was an interesting experience as it finally gave us an opportunity to use printmaking as a method for our art. Below are pictures of my three attempts:

I was actually very dissatisfied with the way my prints had turned out as my scratches were not deep enough, thus causing the lines in the print to be rather faded and I tried to re-scratch over the my first scratches, but this only caused more inequality in the lines as on top of the faded lines there would suddenly be bold and dark, deep lines. As I found out later, if I was unhappy with my print being too faded, usually the artist would redo the entire scratching process. However, I found this much too tedious and I decided to abandon the idea of printmaking.

Also, I found that I did not want to use these pictures as it still had no attachment to me and were simply a very superficial way of representing my ideas (this starting point of collaging was before I started to lean towards the idea of a self-portrait). I tried looking at other pictures to use:

 One of my ideas was to trace these two photos in a simplistic form on tracing paper and layering them, and I actually rather fancied this idea but I decided also to abandon this idea as it was equally if not more superficial than my previous collaging to represent Singapore's culture.
However, when I went to the Liu Kang Exhibition, it finally hit me that I need not be constricted by having to paint out a representative of Singaporean culture but rather I should broaden my mindset and perspective by looking at more than Liu Kang's usual subject matter. When I went to the exhibition, I noticed Liu Kang had done quite a few portraits...

...and I wondered: Why not do a portrait? Why constrict myself solely to the subject matter of Liu Kang's art?
I then searched of the meaning of self-portrait, and it was stated that it was only usually the face and facial features but it was more of the significance of self being involved rather than the actual face. Since I also wanted to incorporate dance, so the fact that the face need not be the focal point of a self-portrait made it easier. I started to make plans for dance poses and such that I could experiment with...

This joy of finding a link which could spur me on to do this project made me even more enthusiastic about the project and I also felt really inspired. So soon after making these plans and developing my concept (shown below)...

I then took out the time to take the reference pictures I expected I would need in the process of doing my final piece.

Among the 100+ photos I had taken that day, I shortlisted a few of the poses as shown above, and the pictures outlined in pink were the pictures I had decided I would be using. I did not want my self-portrait to just be a single piece, but rather with 3 poses, which showed different parts of dance, in a sense, with a single move, a floor-oriented move and a leap. This would make the art piece more dynamic as well.

Here are the actual pictures of the 3 poses I chose for my final product just in case the previous one was not very clear:

The next board was for experiments:

 These are my oil colour tests on regular paper, thus the oil stains...

 A small photocopy of the page I was doing my tests and experimentation of limbs on.

The actual experiments...

 A photocopy of my experiment on pastel paper.

My experiment on the pastel paper using oil colours actually turned out a lot better than I expected and I decided to keep it for my final :) 

I had never worked with oils before, so it was a new experience for me as well and I was genuinely surprised hen I managed to use it so successfully. Throughout my experimentation, however, I had limited myself only to one method of blending the colours and I regret not having done more experimentation with the technique and brushwork. Instead I had used a labour intensive method - dabbing. Much as it was tedious, it paid off in blending the colours beautifully.

Series of Self-Portraits, 2011, each 406x305mm, Oil paint

Above are the pictures of my final piece, and at the end of my project, I found that I was truly satisfied with my paintings, and considering it was my first attempt at oils, I was even more encouraged. However, I felt that I could have been more patient with the blending as one can see that by the time I came to painting the last picture of the leap, I was already starting to "slack off" and got lazy to do the blending properly. Despite this flaw, I was still quite happy as I felt that the paintings were considerably realistic and I could truly feel my pride in my self-portrait for the first time.

Writing 02: Liu Kang Exhibition

We visited the Liu Kang exhibition, partially as to give us AEP students some inspiration for the Liu Kang project we were tasked with, as many of us had artists' block and could not decide what to do or feel inspired. Our education on Liu Kang then was rather limited with the repetition of the usual paintings we saw during lesson, which was usually consisting of:

Artist and Model (1954)

Life by the River (1975)

By visiting the exhibition, we were presented with a wider range of artworks in which we could see what sort of style of Liu Kang we wanted to emulate, instead of a having a flat and 2-dimensional view of the artists and his works, which would give us a biased view of Liu Kang's works. This would only result in a boring project for us. 
The exhibition truly gave us a deeper understanding and more in-depth view about Liu Kang. For example, Liu Kang also had done a negative version of Life by the River.

 This provoked my thoughts: Playing with the colours of the work could also be a possibility. I also was rather fascinated with this work as it due to the use of the negative space, looked very much like a night scene, and I liked this stark contrast of the lighting between the original painting and this adaptation of it. Also since I could finally get up and close to the original painting, I decided to take the liberty of analysing it in close range. 

I looked at the way Liu Kang had painted the figures in simplistic form, using mostly contour lines to form their body shapes, in contrast to the angular shapes of the surrounding areas, like in the first picture where the figures are standing on a bridge, near the kampong houses which are painted with straight lines. He also used the colours very wisely, in the sense that he had strategically used the bold bright colours of the clothes of the figures to highlight the human figures in contrast to the duller background that made use of muted tones.
Offerings, 1957, oil on canvas, 131 x 98 cm

Souri, 1953, oil on canvas, 120 x 70 cm 

Next, I looked at his other iconic paintings of Balinese women, one being Offerings and the other being of a Balinese dancer named Souri. I really liked the colours in these paintings as they were rather bold and bright, and I also felt that the juxtaposition of the complementary colours in either paintings had truly brought out one another and were very effective in showing the exotic-cultural theme of the paintings. These were two of his more detailed paintings in which the the figures were being painted with a more 3-dimensional effect through the use of shadows and highlights. Nonetheless, Liu Kang still stayed true to his style in which he continued to use outlines to delineate the figures and to outline some of the forms in the paintings. Much I liked these paintings, they were not the most inspirational for me.

Near Elizabeth Walk (present Esplanade site), 1979, oil on canvas, 127 x 203 cm

 (Can't find)

 Durian Vendors, 1957, oil on canvas

 National Day, 1967, oil on canvas, 98 x 126 cm

These four paintings contained Liu Kang's distinctive Fauvist-inspired painting style - simplistic blocks of colours to represent forms and the use of single lines to outline the forms. This style of Liu Kang, I found, was rather unique due to it's cartoon-like features, 2-dimensional and flat. He also played with the type of lines he used, in the sense that in some of his paintings, the line were angular and somewhat jarring, but in others, his lines were contoured, bringing a sense of softness and smoothness into the paintings. The lines really brought a very different feel to the individual paintings.

(could not find information)

 (could not find information)

These two paintings, similarly, had illustrated my point about the lines. When we were first introduced by our "guide" to the first painting, I remember that he said that the lines were created by a palette knife (if I'm not wrong) and this was a foreign method to me as the things I recognised as art tools were usually just the brushes and paint, and I thought it was rather interesting making use of such an object. this reminded me abut how even my own art should not be constricted just to a brush and a canvas, but rather, I should explore different usage of materials and tools. 

After the exhibition, I started to roam around, and I found that I in the museum itself, there were quite a bit of cultural elements I could pick off from, and I started to look at patterns, but I still did not feel very inspired by them, but after the trip and looking at Liu Kang's paintings, I truly felt that I had benefited as I could now appreciate Liu Kang's works from more angles, and I was now more sure of what exactly to do, even though I still had to develop my underlying concept. 

More pictures of the drain and the bench at the SAM...