Thesis 2025 / Haiyao Yuan

In this work I am trying to express emotions and contradictions as an overarching theme. It is also a record of myself, a stage-by-stage summary from when I started this project until its latest progress. I absorbed the suggestions from the second thesis committee meeting and put more effort and thought into the installations to make them look more holistic and aesthetically pleasing. Instead of just flat images, elements such as scent, decorative objects, and picture frames have been added to make the whole piece more three-dimensional and provide more of an emotionally-oriented experience.

The whole piece will be a collection of images of different sizes, with dried flowers and books. The books are a collection of my illustrations, and two versions will be placed underneath the display illustrations. Books and part of the installation will also be decorated with dried flowers and aromatherapy to give the viewer a sense of atmosphere and mood.

I used dried flowers and paintings partially consumed by fire. They don't make up much of the work and serve as embellishments. Dried flowers, for example, still look like flowers but are dead, another form of beauty that I find sentimental and beautiful at the same time; they look like staying the same in the moment of opening the most brilliantly. It's romantic and breathtaking to me, in line with the impression I want to have of my work. I don't know myself well, so it's hard to explain in words why I make the choices I make. I chose to use scent, decoration, and arrangement of illustration placement to create a more understanding and feeling-oriented scene; I think these elements help allow the audience to understand what I'm feeling, or the audience can feel their content from it. There are no preliminaries this time so that it can be seen as a brand-new collection of works.

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