FRIENDS

YOUTOBE

Short artist statement:

I’m an international student from China. This work was created during my last year of college in the United States. My works generate reflections and observations on the abstract concept of “friendship”. I think friends need similarity. Friends need respect and help. My work is presented as a video, and the music in the background is my narration of my experiences with my friends.

 

Artist statement:

I’m graduating this summer and I hope I can remember our friendship. I found these friends I met in my final year of college to be very precious and rare. This led me to the idea of ​​making this artwork. I used a video to present this artwork. I hope that when the audience sees my work, they can think of their friends and reflect on their friendships with them.

I use figurative documentation to express the abstract concept of friendship. This artwork explores the factors that make friendship between people and others. The foundation of friendship between people is fairness and similarity. It documents the friendships and interactions between my friends and I, by taking pictures and adding text to describe this experience. Eventually I turned these photos into a video to present as a memoir. My main desire to create this work was to document the time I spent with my friends.

I video show this artwork. I get a sense of what friendship means by watching how I get along with my friends. I found that we were able to provide emotional value to each other. We are all willing to help each other. For example, they will help me with the meal, and I will share the photos of this recording with them. They help others move chairs or clear tables. Our happiness is the same, and we will be happy about the same things. For example, we all like to drink tea and we all think curries are delicious. When one jokes about another, he doesn’t take it seriously and doesn’t take it to heart. This is very important for the maintenance of friendship.

Photographer Julie Blackmon is a huge inspiration and influence to me when I use my camera to capture the moments of my life. His work is very lifelike. He recorded his family members. In his photos, members of his family are doing t heir own thing, not looking at the camera. It made me feel more natural, more authentic, and more immersive. His photos make me feel warm and alive, everyone in the frame seems to be in action.