Rui and I use mask as a medium to explore a fusion between our own identities and the physical and socially constructed properties the mask carries in itself. The project is consists of three pieces of mask, each embodies a concept.
Project Background
The final project of Recurring Concepts in Art was to create a recreation or new iteration of a work that we made in the past. The challenging constraint here was that no contemporary technologies were supposed to be implemented in the final art piece. Me and Rui An decided to distill the core concept of the ReTypography project I created before, and fuse it into format of masks.
Inspiration: Mask
We draw our main inspirations from our recent trip to [MET](https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/keywords/mask/). One interesting thing we found was that, you can find artifacts of masks in almost every culture, in every time period.
We believe that this phenomenon is a direct result of our natural desire, to hide or we say protect our true identities from the world. However there is more to the concept of the mask. As the mask not only blocks your face, but also (normally) provides an alternative to that. A mask provides you a possibility to become something or somebody that is totally different thanks to our preconceived connections between face and identity.
Inspiration: ReTypography Series
The other aspect of inspirations was coming from the previous design project, which was a discussion of the relationship between identity and grid system in graphic design. Grid system could serve as a perfect container for possible disparities, but also exclusion for which.
MASK NO.1
For the first mask, we want to interrogate a traditional Chinese stereotypes about what a man should look like. There is an old saying goes “三庭五眼”, which means the height of a man’s face should be around 3 times the height of his nose. And the width should be around 5 times the width of his eye. According to this stereotype, we created a 3 by 5 grid system mask.
MASK NO.2
For the second mask, we want to challenge the stereotypes about Asian people have small eyes.
MASK NO.3
The third “mask”, has nothing blocking wearer’s face. As the ending piece of our project, we want to send the message that nobody should live under the mask of stereotypes.
