We’re halfway through ALP! This week, our team embarks on making artworks through Chinese phrases. In our team, the choice of phrases were 源远流长, 以柔克刚, 瞬息万变, and 天界之别, and each subteam had to make a design in their resin pieces to resemble the meaning of the phrase. The catch this time was this wood needed to be included within our designs as well, meaning we needed to work round it.
Sanding down the wood
For me, I was in the team doing 瞬息万变, and what we initially thought of doing was to show a change in colours, because we were thinking along the lines of emotion, that emotions can be represented by colours. So we made a circular resin piece that had 2 main colours, blue for peacefulness and red for anger and hatred， with a piece of wood in the middle separating the 2 colours as a sample.
Realising we could do better, we tried incorporating the same colours and colour contrasts for the second artpiece prototype we made. One of our teaching assistants was very helpful and she volunteered to help with the colour mixing for our 2nd artpiece. The process of making our 2nd artwork was tedious. We needed to make 3 layers, each of a mix of different colours. The wood piece came in as a handler for optic fibre cables provided to us for our artpiece, where we intelligently drilled small holes through the wood in order to hold down the optic fibre cables. Now, we needed to fit the optic fibre pieces into the resin, such that when the resin hardened, the fibre pieces wedged inside the resin would make the resin piece beautifully glow through the shining of light at the fibre ends. This encapsulates the idea of 瞬息万变 where there is a sudden great change within a short span of time, which in the case of our artwork, was the sudden introduction of light, making an artwork glow beautifully.
In appreciation of the team’s hardwork, our Professors, Prof Yao Cheng and Prof Zhao treated the entire team to 外婆家! We had a delicious spread of food, some of which cannot be even found in other 外婆家 outlets in Hangzhou! The plus point was the ambiance of the restaurant, which looked more like a 5 star hotel restaurant to me. Since the meal was on the professors, everyone got a chance to order their own favorite dishes on the menu.
We even had a chance to walk round a mall in the nearby area and chanced upon a Japanese anime store selling Japanese anime figurines. It reminded me of my childhood, having been engrossed in books and shows on Naruto and One Piece.
This week, the food I ate was more towards an international side, where I turned to Japanese, Korean, French and Swedish food. A good way to get away from Chinese food for a while.
Last but not the least, let me share with you one interesting thing that I discovered this week.
That’s all for week 6! See you next week!
