Zongbo Jiang
Digital
Spring Term Assessment 2021
25/03/2021
“Visual Activism”
WEEK 1 11/01
.PETA states,
“Animals Are Not Ours to Eat
Animals Are Not Ours to Wear
Animals Are Not Ours to Experiment On
Animals Are Not Ours to Use for Entertainment
Animals Are Not Ours to Abuse in Any Way”
WEEK 2 18/01
Animals are not ours to experiment on.
They feel pain and fear just as we do, and their overwhelming natural instincts – like ours – are to be free and to protect their own lives. They don’t want to be locked in a small cage inside a laboratory.
More than 9 million animals are used in experiments in Europe every year. They may legally be poisoned; deprived of food, water, or sleep; subjected to psychological distress; deliberately infected with diseases; subjected to brain damage; paralysed; exposed to skin or eye irritants; burned; gassed; force-fed; electrocuted; and killed.
Millions more are bred to suffer from debilitating genetic modifications, are used as breeding machines in the cruel supply chain, or languish in cages without being used for experiments until they die.
Peta UK
As before I created work that had a balance of characters and environment, I want to focus more on building the characters to tell the story.
WEEK 3 25/01
Animals Are Not Ours to Wear
Animals are not ours to wear or carry our possessions in. Before their skin or hair reaches shop shelves, animals endure a life of misery, pain, frustration, and fear, and many are skinned alive.
Every year, more than 1 billion animals are slaughtered in the global leather industry. Sheep raised for wool are routinely mutilated, abused, and eventually killed. Foxes, minks, and chinchillas spend their entire lives confined to cramped, filthy wire cages just to be slaughtered for their fur. The exotic-skins industry claims the lives of millions of snakes, alligators, seals, zebras, and other animals.
Since more and more designers are embracing vegan fashion, making compassionate choices is fun and easy.
PETA UK
PETA
19 Images of Animals Used for Clothing That You Need to See This London Fashion Week
Posted by Saskia on September 17, 2020
Wool
When lambs are just a few weeks old, their ears are hole-punched, their tails are cut off, and males are castrated. Farmers use knives, hot irons, or tight clamps to sever parts of the animals’ bodies, often without painkillers.
Mohair
Shearing is extremely stressful to goats, who are prey animals and therefore terrified of being pinned down, vulnerable, and completely defenceless. Goat kids who are being shorn for the first time sometimes cry out in fear.
Leather
Before being turned into belts and bags, many animals used for leather endure all the horrors of factory farming – including intensive confinement inside filthy cages or pens, castration without pain relief, chronic infections and disease caused by extreme crowding, and a terrifying trip to the abattoir.
Fur
The fur industry has long been a byword for cruelty, killing millions of animals a year in horrific ways in order to profit from their skins.
Angora
Angora rabbits are typically kept inside small, filthy, bare cages and face the ordeal of “live plucking” up to four times a year. During this process, they’re often physically restrained as workers yank the hair out of their sensitive skin, leaving only the fur on their heads.
Cashmere
Workers typically comb or shear goats for cashmere once a year, in the spring moulting season in April and May. According to one farmer, shearing is “very stressful” to the animals and robs them of natural insulation, leaving them vulnerable to low temperatures and illness.
Exotic Skins
Animals exploited for exotic skins may be poached from the wild or raised on squalid farms and killed in the most gruesome and painful ways before being imported to Europe and used by “luxury” brands
Animals Are Not Ours to Abuse
Every animal deserves a chance to thrive in a responsible and permanent home.
But for every companion animal who lives indoors with a human family and receives the attention, health care and emotional support that he or she needs, there are thousands just barely surviving. Millions of domestic animals never know a kind human touch and live hard lives on the street before dying equally hard deaths. Others suffer neglect at the hands of unfit guardians or are victims of deliberate cruelty.
PETA UK
Over a year after PETA Asia visited coconut-picking regions in Thailand and found use of forced monkey labor, a new PETA Asia investigation has now found that monkeys are still being used at many farms and that monkey schools and coconut-picking competitions using monkeys are still in operation. Even though retailers around the world stopped purchasing Thai coconut products, the Thai coconut industry, including Chaokoh and the Thai Food Processors Association, and Thailand’s ambassador to the U.S. are actively misleading global brands and consumers about the continued use of monkey labor.
WEEK 4 01/02
Animals Are Not Ours to Use for Entertainment
Animals are not circus acts or toy trains. Yet many are imprisoned for life, forced to perform in ways that are unnatural to them and that may result in injuries or even death. Shockingly, there are still industries that profit from animals’ misery in the name of entertainment.
At home or abroad, always stay away from places that keep animals in captivity, use them in cruel spectacles, or treat them as profit-making machines. It’s time to make our society truly compassionate by banning all abusive pastimes and “sports” that harm animals.
Elephant Rides Are Wrong
Elephants’ spirits must be broken before humans can climb onto their backs. Handlers separate baby elephants from their mothers, tether them with ropes, starve them, gouge them with weapons, and beat them mercilessly for weeks on end. Those who survive this hell spend their lives in servitude under the constant threat of punishment. They’re often worked to death.
Animals Are Not Ours to Eat
Cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, and fish have feelings, thoughts, and personalities, just as we do. Yet the meat, dairy, egg, and fishing industries treat them like machines, with cruelty that’s hard to swallow.
Humans don’t need to eat animal flesh, milk, or eggs to live. In fact, we’re healthier if we don’t! Going vegan is easy, and it’s better for our health, the environment – and our consciences.
WEEK 5 08/02
Artists working with data
Jan Švankmajer
WEEK 5 08/02
Working off the illustrations based on my research, I started to build and experiment with different character designs. Also testing out different software and approaches to new techniques such as using hair and drawing on the skin.
I tried to incorporate the shapes of the skin when it removed back to the body. Playing around with different materials and shapes.
After building the character, I wanted to try and combine 2D and 3D elements together to help tell the story. So I created some illustrations and applied them to background, also playing with using them as prints for the garments on the characters.
WEEK 6 15/02
Here I have drawn marks on the body to add more details to the work to further refine the characters and tell the stories in a more detailed way.
Bullfighting: A Bloody Execution
When designing the clothes for this character I tried to make it marry with the movement of the character, whilst also linking to the colour and style of traditional bullfighting garments.
After reflecting on the earlier characters, I thought that there was too much detail that the message got lost. So with this character I decided to focus more on shape, colour and patterns to show these aspects.
WEEK 7 22/02
Your development of “hybrid” characters make the
concepts more relatable by using humanity as a vehicle for association, and this is powerful.
The balance becomes important so as not to lose the message and impact if they become
too abstract.
After reflecting on the work review I wanted to focus more on these elements. Also to try and not make the characters too detailed or abstract that the message is lost and isn't conveyed.
Under the Skin
Paul McCarthy
Patricia piccinini
After this research I was inspired by the form and shape and thought that this could be applied to the character based on the skin and fur being removed. I then played around with molding the shape of the character to give that sense of movement and removing the skin.
With this character I wanted to try playing with different colours and poses to further focus on the idea of a 'green product', but the topic is the opposite of this.
When creating the bull character I went back to my earlier research as I wanted to use the elements of the abuse they face to create the form of the character. The colour and shape and movement of the body reflects the torment that the bulls go through before, during and after the bullfight.
When moving forward with the 'animals are not ours to experiment on' character, I wanted to create a second character that showed da different side to this topic as it is so broad. Here I look more at cosmetic testing as I felt that it would be interesting to portray within a character.
WEEK 8 01/03
Notes 5th March
Zongbo- How do you describe yourself and what do you do? Your web feed is a great documentary but how will you edit this to present? You will have sub 10 secs to get peoples attention (6 secs if you believe what research says).
Holly called your work “Visual Activism”- how do you feel about that descriptor?
Consider where is the endpoint for what you are doing-how many characters are you aiming to create. The new ones set against white backgrounds have a very different feeling to the ones in sets/worlds. It feels like a series of rooms-how will it be encountered-is it a gallery? Or is it more like Dantes Inferno/Jodorwski Holy Mountain where all is combined into a huge Melee something like the film Mother:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother!
What is the narrative/Text/Voice? What do your characters say-do they have a voice or is it narration, or just text?
After the tutorial I began to think about how I can catagorise myself and my work. The term' visual activism' was mentioned and I thought that this is something that reflects what I am trying to do. But i also needed to think about how this can be translated into my work.
Also think further about how I can present the work and get this message across in a short time. I thought about just focusing on the characters and the details on their bodies and garments.
“Visual Activism”
From research I wanted to think about how to show the human involvement, but not so direct, so I created this character that can feature in the designs to show the actions that affect the animals for example over feeding them, or removing the skin etc. I also wanted to focus on this with the stance of the characters to too, to further back up visually what the issues are.
For this clothes design, it follows the shape pf the body and also acts as a cover for what is often unseen. There is a gap in the middle that offers a little look, but we are often not able to see the full extent, or we don't want to see it.
Here I tried to add some illustrations into the design for the clothes to further add to the aesthetic and connection to the topic. The colour is also significant, the black is the cover up and underneath is this rich red that represents the blood and death in the industry.
