web of emotions
Artist Book/ Print/ Photography/ Chinese-English
ABOUTWeb of Emotions is a conceptual artist book using mixed media and embroidery and is inspired by the very personal experience of being stuck in my head.
Personal ProjectYear of Completion2022
Despondent/ 木
Moody/ 闷
Disillusioned/ 茫
Rationalizing / 虑
In Denial/ 賴
Depressed / 郁
Excited/ 兴
Irritable/ 煩
Lonely/ 孤
Stressed/ 焦
Antisocial/ 逆
Anxious/ 躁
THE SPARKThere was once a period of time when I was experiencing a lot of changes in my life, and hence, I often was caught in spells of introspection. During these times, my feelings felt terribly overwhelming, yet I couldn’t figure out why. As someone who doesn’t often get stuck in my head and experience these pains, I realized how rare of an opportunity this was to be personally experiencing such strong seemly negative feelings, hence I decided to use these experiences as the subject of an artist book.
By striving to analyze, identify, and understand my experiences, I not only had a unique personal subject for my personal candidacy review project for graduate school, but also found the process greatly therapeutic. The ability to use a constructive attitude to approach a subject so personal was also empowering and healing.
PROCESSEvery panel represents a strong emotion I experience when I get stuck in my head. When closed, the final book becomes a web of feelings and emotions that appears to be a unintelligible jumble, but upon unravelling the book and examining each panel separately, every emotion can be understood with more clarity. Although confusing and often overwhelming, each emotion comes together to inform me as a whole, which is why I designed the artist book to unravel into a full circle.
After identifying the twelve strongest emotions I have during these spells in both Chinese and English, I created self portraits to physically manifest them. Using embroidery, I then hand-stitched the Chinese word for each emotion onto each panel to create a part of my web.
The outside book wrap represents the limitations of my headspace and invites viewers to literally “take me out of my head” by taking the book out of the wrap. The Chinese title for the book is “郁结在心” which means “stuck in my head”, but can also be a play on words which means “emotional knots in my heart.”
