U3. Additional content
Professional Experiences
Book & Exhibitions & Artists & Lectures
Professional Experiences:
International Original Print Exhibition 2024
7-17 November, 2024
Small But Mighty 2024
19-29 September, 2024
The Director’s Cut – Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2024
01-08 August, 2024
Clifford Chance – Postgraduate printmaking in London 2024
03 December, 2024 -17 January, 2025
After a year of continuous creation, I am happy to have had opportunities to participate in exhibitions, including receiving the Hawthorn Printmaker Supplies Award at the International Original Print Exhibition. These experiences have reinforced my decision to continue my artistic journey. After completing my postgraduate studies, I plan to make full use of London’s printmaking resources, including studios/workshops and exhibitions，to stay active. A short-term goal is to successfully apply for artist residencies, while also deepening my knowledge of ecology and nature through relevant books and art exhibitions. If possible, I will collaborate with classmates to rent a studio for creative work. My long-term goal may involve pursuing a PhD, so before that, I intend to explore and refine the direction I wish to focus on further.
Book & Exhibitions & Artists & Lectures:
Ryuichi Sakamoto
Book：How many more times will I see the full moon
My reading notes：
Ryuichi Sakamoto personally considers his most outstanding work to be Concerto for Koto and Orchestra (2010). This four-movement concerto blends concepts of the four seasons — “winter, spring, summer, autumn” — with ideas like “stillness and fetal movement,” “germination and birth,” and “growth, dusk, darkness, and death.” It flows like a minimalist musical framework, subtly emerging like a spring. At the same time, it embodies “emotional” sharpness within “rigor and restraint,” intertwined with the beauty of “romance.” This piece was a requiem composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto for his mother.
He notes that the word “winter” comes from the verb meaning “to reproduce,” signifying the continuation of life, while spring comes from the verb “to open,” symbolizing seeds taking root, sprouting, and expanding energy. Thus, he believes it should follow the sequence of winter, spring, summer, and autumn.
After witnessing the aftermath of the 2011 Japan earthquake, he regarded the disaster site as the ultimate installation piece. He deeply felt that everything humans create will ultimately be destroyed. This led him to a sense of helplessness — the effort to create music and expression would eventually lose meaning. He then began to entertain the thought of “whether something could be added to these ruins” — how many more full moons could he witness rise?
This idea makes me think of using existing eco-friendly methods for creative practice, such as extracting natural pigments from nature or using fungi in artwork.
Emma McNally ： The Earth is Knot Flat Exhibition
I visited Emma McNally’s exhibition at Drawing Room, where the main gallery space was transformed into an immersive installation. Visitors were given flashlights to interact with the space. McNally incorporated cinematic projections into her drawn installations, creating a more captivating experience. Her works, primarily made with graphite, reflect her belief that graphite marks us as much as we mark with it. The dust of graphite floats in the room, symbolizing the delicate balance of life and our fragile existence. The artworks, created with traditional materials like pencil, graphite, gum arabic, and kaolin clay, explore natural forms such as glaciers, mountains, and streams, incorporating a sense of movement and organic flow.
Experiencing her work made me realize the vast potential of drawing as a medium. I began to envision how one day I could fill an entire room with drawings, creating an endless network of life that intertwines and expands. When using the flashlight to illuminate McNally’s works, the intricate drawings evoked images of star charts or maps of the mind, reflecting her fascination with complex systems and her engagement with science, technology, philosophy, and music.
McNally’s art is about perception rather than vision, interpreting the elusive space where the virtual and physical worlds overlap. She extracts information from various online resources, blending elements like physics, sound, biology, communication, and weather patterns through her physical process of drawing and marking. In doing so, she creates relational zones on paper where the physical and virtual worlds collide and interlace, abstractly reflecting human existence.
Julie Mehretu：
I was in Venice looking at the Art Biennale when I discovered Julie Mehretu’s exhibition. I was immediately drawn to her work. She works in paintings, drawings and prints, and describes her paintings as ‘psychogeographical’, dealing with memory across time, space and place.
The artist explores abstract images of natural disasters, crises or topography. Using ink and paint, she both visualises the accumulation of history and expresses her own reactions through multiple layers of application, erasure and overlay in transparent media. The paintings are layered with acrylic mixtures, drying to leave a transparent base colour ready to capture another set of marks with a different focus and opacity. She draws inspiration from the history of art and human civilisation to create new forms and find unexpected resonances. And I feel in her work like a musical score telling the sound and feeling of the city, her lines are full of movement, like the trajectory of a person walking in the city and any movement in the city, her different coloured lines also remind me of the course of an aeroplane flying in the sky. The lines speak of different patterns of human behaviour intertwined with each other reminding me of my own work, about entanglement and connection.
Elias Sime：
“Binary ፊት አና ጀርባ” is an official collateral event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale, focusing on how technology has made life more convenient yet distanced people from one another. Elias Sime uses recycled materials such as keyboards, circuits, and wires to illustrate the fragility of the binary divide between private and public spheres. This duality, which has become blurred in the digital age, not only encourages viewers to reflect on the tension between personal and public lives but also highlights the profound impact of this structure on individual psychology, identity, and self-expression. This series, which the artist began in 2009, explores the core role of smartphones in daily life. Sime views this device as both a symbol of identity and a metaphor for the tense systems driving global communication. These ubiquitous devices are powered by precious metals mined under harsh conditions, and their geological scarcity and associated geopolitical issues raise significant moral and ecological concerns. Through his artwork made from recycled electronics, Sime addresses the complex relationships between humanity, technology, and the natural world. His work balances human interaction with nature, progress with tradition, and materials with concepts, hinting at the friction between the natural and the man-made. The material choice in his work emphasises the communication of these themes. In the Anthropocene context, products invented for progress have inadvertently become part of the environmental problems due to improper disposal methods. When people see the densely packed circuit boards and wires in his artwork, they are likely to be struck by the overwhelming scale of consumption they reflect.
Artist Talk：Kim L Pace
In one of her works, Kim L. Pace used drawing to capture the elusive form of smoke. By surrounding the drawing with rulers, she created a sense of measuring the unmeasurable, which I found fascinating. This led me to explore forms of death in my lithograph piece, questioning if death itself could be visualized and quantified.
Kim has been creating art continuously for 30 years and shared her method of sustaining a daily drawing practice. When I asked how she ensures she has something to draw each day, she explained that drawing isn’t something that just happens when you sit down—it’s an accumulation of observations. She has developed a personal image library, or “archive in her mind,” that allows her to continuously draw.
I was also drawn to Kim L. Pace’s ceramic work and the way it was displayed on trees, which deepened my understanding of how art can connect with nature. This presentation method demonstrated a unique integration of the visible and invisible, enhancing the materiality of the work in its environment. Through these pieces, I could see how art interacts with natural elements, allowing a new layer of meaning to emerge.
Artist Talk：Chrystel Lebas
Chrystel Lebas, a photographer, discussed her immersive experiences of walking and living alone in the forest, through which she captures nature’s hidden, often forgotten facets in her images. Her close-up shots delve into the complexities beneath our romanticized perceptions of nature, emphasizing its raw harshness and purpose. This approach critically examines humanity’s relationship with the environment and our reactions to the vanishing wilderness. Lebas is particularly attentive to the interactions between humans and animals; for instance, she often photographs animal remains discovered in the forest, which prompt reflections on untold histories of life and death, as well as human influence.
Lebas prefers to shoot during dusk, using the unique lighting to evoke a sense of the sublime, a quality that invites viewers to reflect on humanity’s place within nature. Her search for “one square inch of silence” represents an elusive peace in areas untouched by human noise, and her panoramic images and sound recordings of untouched forests immerse the viewer in nature’s complexity, exploring how time and place shape natural phenomena. Through this work, she presents landscapes shaped by human impact, highlighting the sublime alongside the fragile and transient.
In her presentation, she encouraged using well-designed publications to make one’s work visible and to foster potential collaborations. She advised not to expect immediate results from exhibitions or publications but to view these efforts as seeds for future opportunities.
During our group presentation with Sian Mooney, I heard a painting student describe her work as healing through nature, which led the teacher to ask an interesting question: “How do you view the violence in nature?” She also mentioned the saying “nature’s teeth and claws are red,” which I had never considered before in relation to violence in nature. She further stated that birth itself is violent, which was surprising because people often focus on the positive aspects of childbirth, rarely discussing the violence of the process. When it was my turn to present, she asked if I incorporated any emotions into my artwork, to which I responded that I found it healing—was that an emotion? She explained that emotion in artwork is not only about personal feelings but also about the experiences and discoveries made through experimental exploration. This process of trial and discovery also adds emotional depth to the work. It gave me a new understanding of emotion.
Student research presentations:
Making proposal Toolkit:
During the “Making Proposal” session led by artist Juliet Haysom, she provided useful resources like ArtQuest, ArtRabbit, and Starving Artists, which can help with art project proposals. She emphasized the importance of presenting ideas visually, either through detailed artwork or using Photoshop to create collages. Most importantly, Haysom encouraged bold imagination for future work and clear communication of concepts. She also stressed the value of second opinions, advising seeking feedback from friends to ensure the proposal is well-rounded and complete. These insights are especially useful for my future residency applications.