Zhu (Catherine)

Curatorial Rationale  

The theme for my artworks is “dream”, this dream refers to the phenomenon of people actually dreaming, different types of dream, including nightmares, sweet ones and sad dreams and etc., and my own experiences, which are the main theme and inspiration for my exhibition pieces.  There are 8 pieces exhibition pieces, the material that is mostly used is acrylic painting. This is because I believe acrylic is easier to draw heavy layers, so is easier to adjust colors for the painting. The exhibition pieces are mostly colorful and mainly has warm color, because of the theme, when people picture dream, it could be either very colorful, or very dark if is nightmare, or it could be vague (when people can’t remember what they dream about)   There are a few colorful exhibition pieces, which all represents mixed emotions and happiness people feel. The pieces ‘After Vermeer’, ‘Ballet Parade’ and ‘Home’ is mainly colorful, There are also painting that has cold color and the theme is depressing and dark, which are the pieces ‘Flower Web series’ and ‘My diary’, ‘Lost Hope’, ‘Story in Dream’, The other painting, that is more neutral, including the piece that is about coronavirus event recently, named ‘prayer’, which is neither too negative or positive, the inspiration was more from imagination and extension on the concept of dream, other than types of dreams. Since there are mixed emotions in these painting, I would’ve designed the exhibition space with more neutral and little bit warmer colors as most of the paintings are dark. I would also place some light cotton or blank near some paintings or on the ground to make it fit the atmosphere of dream. And maybe hang different colors of blanket or wallpaper to make the space looks more colorful other than just 1 color. The purpose of these designs would help the audience to get the idea and concept better, with the help of background color, which might help them to feel resonance and have a better emotional connection with my exhibit pieces after reading the exhibit text.    I developed my abstract painting styles and learnt different types of abstract style and abstract techniques, and the importance of material, for example, acrylic and oil painting shows a more strong visual feeling of the painting, and I feel like drawing with colored pencils and crayons (material that are not painting and does not involve water), may be easier to control, but does not show the strong effect I want, and it does not really fill the whole painting, the negative space created by pencils seems empty, therefore, for the piece where I decided to use colored pencil, I eventually had use water color to cover up the empty space and redraw the piece, because the water color had better effect than colored pencil. While the audience looking at my pieces, I want them to feel the emotions and see the experiences I felt through my dreams. The purpose is that I want the audience to see the paintings, and feel resonance with the emotions in the dreams, because the painting is very abstract, so it would be hard for audience to understand the concept straight sway but they would be thinking about the meaning of the painting while looking at it.