Ieok Cheng Chang
Contemporary Commonality 1, 2020, 30 x 40 inches, Acrylic on Linen
Recently, I watched a video starring Chen Danqing, an art critic, who discussed questions about what is happening to contemporary youth. The biggest problem contemporary youth face is that our personalities are affected easily and that our thoughts are more and more alike; Our personalities are not as strong as the old / past generation when the network was not so well-developed. Nowadays, we share the same internet and media and we receive similar data. Every output on the internet we read and watch has an equal setting of thoughts. The world with a well-developed network eliminates differences in many aspects; that makes our personal identity get closer, and it makes less unique personalities among contemporary youth.
With the given concept, I started to realize it is an ongoing problem and I started to think about one’s self-definition. In Contemporary Commonality, I create a series of six abstract paintings with the sizing between 18 and 40 inches. There is also an individual painting that is not in the series but shares the same concept. It represents the images of the old generation, where everyone is different in terms of their thoughts and aspects, compared with images of the new generation, which is us. This shows that our personal identities are gradually getting closer and it is because we are deeply affected by the internet.
