V&A Museum

Fig 1. sketches on V&A (author's own)

 

I've been to the V&A Museum a couple of times before and as someone that's usually quite good with maps, I never fail to get lost in there! But I suppose it's not a bad thing to get lost once in a while (just not great when it's happening at the same place all the time!!) :)) But as for the exhibitions (that I finally managed to find), I have to say, they were pretty amazing. The photography exhibition 'Making it up: Photographic Fiction' was a room filled with not only high quality work, but entertaining ones too. 

 

Above is a photo taken from my sketchbook, on the left, between the collage created using the V&A booklets, you will see small sketches of sections from Xing Danwen's piece 'Urban Fiction No. 23'- 2005. The building in the original photograph is a sales model for a new development, Danwen digitally inserts herself into the image creating an unsettling storyline where her lover is in a hurry to get away (naked) when they realise her partner has arrived back home. Danwen's aim was to express her feelings about urban life in China as she feels it can be 'psychologically isolating and unreal'. So we could fixate various assumptions to this narrative, for example, it could be that the lady's partner is never home, always working, maybe doesn't even connect emotionally with her like he used to when they first got together, it could also be that she's only using him for his money, status and power, while her lover is not just a fling but her true love. Maybe neither of them are. When you realise all the possible storylines, you then start to notice that nothing is how it seems when looked at from the outside world. It is very easy to judge, when in reality we have no idea why the lady in the story did what she did, who's the bad guy here? We will never know, and Danwen successfully reflected this fact of life.

 

On the right page, you can see a quick sketch of one of three images created by Frances Kearney, 'Five people thinking the same thing II, III and V'- 1998. She says that her figures are absorbed in 'lost time', caught in a moment of personal reflection. She picks up on those moments we have in life, moments that could even last for five seconds where we find ourselves finding ourselves. These moments don't need to be emotion filled, in fact, it could be the five seconds of feeling nothing which truly is something. Dazing off into nothingness, the mind being completely blank, these are moments that very rarely visit us in life. Whenever we try to not think, we find ourselves thinking, maybe even thinking of not thinking! So these rare accidental moments of actually not thinking may be more significant than we realise.