Category: UNIT 2 POSITIONS
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Symposium
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My project began with a simple but powerful cultural moment:In June 2023, a meme known as “Speechless Buddha” suddenly went viral across China. The meme originates from The Thinking Arhat, a ceramic sculpture displayed at the Jingdezhen China Ceramics Museum. Online, users paired the image with captions like: This minimal, silent figure became a way…
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∆ 3 SYNTHESIS
From Online Anonymity to Material Presence This research phase expands on my investigation of the emotional paradox in contemporary Chinese youth culture, focussing primarily on the tension between suppressed inner cries and outward displays of passive compliance—the former frequently released through anonymous digital spaces, the latter manifesting on the surface. Young people in Chinese online…
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∆ 2 WRITING
Memes, Emotion, and the Limits of Expression In the age of widely used digital communication, memes have become one of the most popular ways to express emotions. They spread more quickly than words and are frequently used in online communities as a shorthand for group emotions like humour, annoyance, tiredness, and despair. However, a basic…
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∆ 1 STUDIO
These are the three memes that I picked under the buddha-like and lying-flat culture context. They share the emotions either disappointment or screaming inside. So I took memes out of the fast-scrolling online environment and transforming them into large-scale printed artefacts. People must confront it. I used transparent question cards beside each print.These cards asked…
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Positions through dialogue
Introduction It seems that many young Chinese take on a mindset resembling “Buddha-like” or “Lying-flat,” signifying their disengagement from competitive and social pressures. But beneath this outward display of indifference lies a restless inner voice. Rarely are these emotions expressed orally; instead, they are transmitted via the digital anonymity of the internet. Online, emojis, memes,…
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Written Response for Positions through contextualising
Extended Critical Analysis: Text The article “Lying Flat: Profiling the Tangping Attitude” by Marine Brossard provides a thoroughly contextualised examination of the “tangping” (lying flat) phenomenon as a political and cultural act of nonviolent protest in modern-day China. The article’s main contention is that lying-flat is a significant reaction to the intensely competitive, high-pressure atmosphere…
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Positions through contextualising
In the Chinese context, Buddha-Like youth mainly refers to people in their 20s or 30s who are pursuing a peaceful lifestyle in a fast-paced society. Despite being labeled as a “Buddhist mindset,” the term does not have a lot to do with Buddhist traditions. Instead, it refers to a laissez-faire attitude by which one does…
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Written Response for Positions through iterating
In this flip‑book project, I interrogate how iterative visual sequences can evoke the unexpected beauty of sadness inherent in the moment when Agnès Varda and JR are stood up at Jean‑Luc Godard’s doorstep in Faces Places, transforming absence into poetic presence (Brody, 2017). I wonder, how does repetition heighten emotional immediacy? What new meanings emerge…