Oct 10, 2022

Project 4: Crusader

Artwork Title: Who's Who?

For this week's project - Crusader / Creating a activist artwork, I chose the topic of racism and racial bias, in particular that towards the Asian community. Can you guess what the idea behind this piece is?

------ Process Below ------

I took photos of asian students around campus, particularly people of East and South East Asian origin.

Growing up in Vietnam, I never had any trouble with racism and never noticed any phenomenons surrounding my racial identity given the homogenuity of the country. However, during my studies in the US, I witnessed the issue of racism present in discussions and real life all the time. I have also been racially discriminated on the streets and in places I never expected.

One of the main thing I encountered is other people calling me and others "Chinese" and "yellow skinned" just because we are asian. Another issue was that many could not tell the difference between asian people.

As a result, in this artwork I portray the ridiculousness of racism through the eyes of those people, placing viewers in a zone of discomfort as they notice the strangeness of the pictures being presented. In addition, I made the pictures roll one after the other, enhancing this effect.

Using Procreate and Deepfake filters, I morphed the faces to create natural-looking textures of the face. Through creating this piece, I was able to make art to speak for my identity while also raising awareness of an important topic to the audience. My personal anger towards racism was crucial to this piece - by tunneling my emotions to every picture, I emphasize the problem through visual connections between photos. Connecting my background in Computer Science with my art projects, I further explored my identity, as an Asian male artist and a computer science student.

Materials:

- Photographs of Asian people in my school

- Deepfake program

- Procreate on Ipad

- Slides presentation