Critical Reflection
In my practice, I use writing to reflect on the development of my practice and secondary research. These texts and pictures are my diaries of ideas. I record my inspirations and look for similarities. I think this is a very good way to help me sort out my creative thinking and find creative themes.
Nihilism has always been a topic of great interest to me and I found further inspiration by listing the different types of nihilism.
Why am I interested in nihilism? In the process of self-understanding, I always encounter a wall, and this wall is a contradiction. No matter how I understood it, it was meaningless. I replayed my mental activities and tried to interpret myself from different angles. I found that the views I listed were all contradictory and meaningless, just like reading them in succession. The results of contradictions are numerous and complex because the contradictory elements themselves are variables, and contradictions promote the continuous change of human beings. Contradictions also exist in people, and people have desires. Because there are too many different intersecting desires, conflicts will arise between people and themselves, and between two people. There is a collision between different desires and they are contradictory. （Anthropology and the Study of Contradictions）
I feel like a Möbius strip, a maze of ego that I can’t get around. Later, I accidentally talked to a friend about this topic and her words inspired me, "Then you can continue to be contradictory. Maybe the track the train is traveling on will remain unchanged, but the surrounding scenery will always change."
Contradictions will continue to exist. As time goes by, contradictory results will exist for a while and then transform into new contradictions. Desire and consciousness are like the raw materials for people's contradictory engines. They are closely related, and the result of desire will turn into a contradiction. Whether the existence of contradiction is due to the existence of consciousness, it will not disappear with the disappearance of consciousness, but only consciousness can know the existence of contradiction.（Putnam, L.L., Fairhurst, G.T. and Banghart, S., 2016）
I determined my goal. Since I couldn't get out of that logical maze, I set my goal on specific things or objects to further understand myself. Starting from me as the center and spreading my thoughts to the surroundings, the first thing I think of is interpersonal relationships, because I think this is an item that exists in all processes of a person's growth. Secondly, I also thought of recording my different emotions every day and starting with the topics that I think I avoid the most. I recorded every possible inspiration.
This was my first time participating in a tutorial. When Ms. Allen and I were discussing my chosen topic, she gave me inspiration from old photos of my family or my childhood photos as a starting point to find topics.
I started to expand through the inspiration I got. I think the family environment is an innate condition for me, and the social environment is an acquired condition. I think it is a good way; it was at this moment that I decided to explore it through painting-related photos. Factors that affect oneself to better understand oneself.
I began to analyze the composition of my family environment. The ones that had the greatest impact on me were my Chinese education and my mother. Chinese education not only affected me but also the family environment, it affected people’s thinking logic and the family. The composition of the environment thus became a Chinese-style family.
The Confucian value, xiao (filial piety), is particularly related to Chinese family communication patterns. An institutionalized hierarchy in relationships in traditional Chinese society gives parents more power over their children. Traditional Chinese parents expect their children to perform filial piety, obey and conform without question, and act on their commands, so traditional Chinese family is more conformity-oriented than conversation-oriented (Zhang, Q., 2007).
I think a family based on this value concept is like a fishbone stuck in my throat. It stings when I swallow my saliva, but I can't spit it out. I love my family, but sometimes a lot of my troubles come from my family. This also further influenced me in the process of painting. I prefer to express my views on the family environment through the depression and a little weirdness of the picture.
The bad habits of traditional Chinese family marriages that I collected when I was thinking.
My ideas gradually became clearer, and I participated in Ms. Yvonne's tutorial. At that time, I fell into a bottleneck period. I felt that my pictures were always not up to the standard I expected. Ms. Yvonne made a suggestion and told me that maybe I should not use it too much. If you rely too much on the images in the photos, maybe you can add some intuitive processing techniques. This is the reason why my painting style suddenly changed in the early and late stages of the painting process. I think it also helps me see myself from another angle.
For the next creation, I want to depict different selves based on what I have learned about myself.
Putnam, L.L., Fairhurst, G.T. and Banghart, S., 2016. Contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes in organizations: A constitutive approach. Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), pp.65-171.
Zhang, Q., 2007. Family communication patterns and conflict styles in Chinese parent-child relationships. Communication Quarterly, 55(1), pp.113-128.
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