Collage and Digital Bricolage: September 2015

September 31, 2015

Again, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted but a lot has happened.

In May, I was invited to teach a class on Collage and Digital Bricolage at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in Wuhan, China. I had been to Wuhan in February for one week to work on a design project for the Wuhan Metro system with the HIFA Cultural Corporation that is a design corporation affiliated with the school. This time I spent the entire month of May in Wuhan with my fiancé Jaala and Xiao Han, a graduate student from Wuhan in our MFA program here. Xiao acted as my interpreter, helped organize things with the school and was a godsend in helping to ensure a successful project so can’t thank her enough.

I also have to thank Zhang Guanghui, the Dean of Printmaking and a revered Chinese artist, who is a really cool guy, a great artist and a very gracious host and Xu Yongmin, the President of HIFA and a well-known artist. Also Xu Fan, a printmaker who is the Vice-President of the Institute as well as Zhang Lian, a printmaking professor who I became friends with while there. These people are all very fine artists and printmakers.

The course, which was the first time I’ve taught it, couldn’t have gone better. The students were keen and produced a lot of great work in a short amount of time. I gave a public lecture called Miscellany: The Effect of Collage on Contemporary Art and it was met with great enthusiasm by the whole school so I found an appreciative and receptive audience. Students began by making handmade collage from found elements, then made prints from the scanned collages, then made digital collage and prints and some made handmade collage from printed digital collage. As you see here, the students caught on to the idea of collage very naturally and produced really strong work in a short amount of time. Some students indicated that collage had changed everything for them. A final comment by Yi Lin-Jia said it all: “the whole world is a collage!”