Kia Ora, Balloon Says

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.”
Neil Armstrong

A sense of not knowing provokes curiosity and anticipation. It is the sensation that triggers us to know the unknown.

I often find myself dealing with dualistic concepts; space and place, virtual and real, and known and unknown. The duality that coexists and conflicts within our reality is constantly shifting from one point to another. Kia Ora, Balloon Says is an inquisitive series to such transitional space. They are the reminiscences of what has happened, and what could have happened, ended, but still expanding.

http://hikarim92.wix.com/kiaoraballoonsays

Feedback and Concerns

(Feedback I have received during the last critique for Wa)

• Cold Readings
  A sense of belonging/acceptance
  All works present relations hips of Sender-Receiver of two or more people
  Travel – coming and going, landing, fitting in.
• Installation
  Videos take a lot of time-too much to view in the amount of time. Maybe install in a more dispersed way would allow people to have room.
  Having them all together allows us to view only snippets.
  Low-fi videos and low tech photo copies – nice, discovering rather than polished, they are records of the journey.
  Mental notes in a visual way.
  Paper plane needs to be better shot – distracting and frantic.
  Animation (3D model) – Not sure how it fits.
  Documents not on the wall, in a folder?
• Video
  Do you want the viewer to watch and spend time with each video? What about burning onto DVDs to create a catalogue?
  Would making videos more low-tech make viewers more interested?
• What is more important? – seeing the person or what they are saying.
  Video editing – don’t want to change their comment/non-biased documents. I must be honest.
  Maybe have transcripts to accompany videos.
  Location – domestic vs public.
  Reveal secrets of people coming to NZ, specific details of their lives.
  How to get people to talk about real stuff can be relevant.
  Build a personal relationship, invite them to dinner, have a glass of wine…
  She has come to NZ for a better life but looks to be living quite humbly (Krystin’s mom).
• Can both things come together?
  Digital and physical identity
  They work separate, not same as each other.
  Cultural translation and digital => physical ie. 3D printing, scanning…
  3D Origami Aeroplane?
• Is the work too personal?
  -No you find yourself through relating to other people.

• Concerns & Feedback
  Political naturally comes through exhibiting ‘personal’.
  Video editing is crucial to the work.
  Is some parts of conversations more interesting than others?
  Reconfigure maybe objects/property of the interviewees.
  From a path of close people to the path of unknown path – bring what I have received from the previous path.
  It is better to have consent letters/model permissions.

Wa (和) (2014)

Everything is shifting. It’s the transition from one point to another, a sentiment over time, and information change from analogue to digital.My works investigate what is gained and lost during its transitional process by observing individuals and altered materiality, and celebrate each distinct nature as a whole.

Whitecliffe BFA Graduation Exhibition 2014

Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design
The End of Year: BFA Graduation Exhibition
21^st November – 23^rd November 2014
130 St. George’s Bay Road, Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand

Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design presents Bachelor of Fine Arts and Photography: The End of Year Graduation Show.

The End of Year Graduation Exhibition is a departing point for graduating students from their four years of education to their future professional art career. It is a great opportunity to experience variety of creative talents and artworks of emerging artists.

Hikari Masunaga (Japan, 1992) exhibits her final academic year of artworks developed around both personal and political concept of ‘transition’. Her works juxtapose with high and low tech media, and its informational and technological shift. She also looks at the movement of human migration in New Zealand from her immigrant perspective, documenting her intimate conversations with interviewees.

Note; this is for the upcoming exhibition in November, and the date and information written above may change.

Ropriate 1.5 (2014)

Utilizing commercial structures such as gaming programs, 3D prints and mass-produced digital images, Ropriate 1.5 manifests my personal conflicts with contemporary art through the process of appropriation and collaboration. Translating existing artworks through a psychological anxious aesthetic, it questions the authenticity and value of original art in this digital era.

The Art of Painting [Acryl gouache on 130 x 110 cm canvas], The Art of Painting [Printed on A4 papers], Mr. Dob, Pieta [ABS plastic], The Doll [PLA plastic], Untitled [Unity program on screen].

Ropriate (2014)

Ropriate (2014) presents digital parodies of artworks that never die in the self-reflective cycle of contemporary art. Here, authenticity and objectivity are not accounted for their values.
I am interested in the aesthetic flaw and loss by translating the work of other artists into the digital platform where commercial and fine arts intrigue, creating a new form of communication with heavily appropriated artworks.

Bay J (2014)

Bay J (2014)
Continuing my investigation in this media, I became more immersed in its fluidity. The more I search for solid answers, the deeper maze it leads into.
Fictional image making has been the centre theme to my practice. For me these images mirror the materialistic reality and project what is the core which constructs the reality. The reality is ever a sceptical and delusional concept which one cannot provide explanations nor answers, but only question.

Now-here (2013)

‘Now-here’ (2013)

Human perception is delusional in the way that we are incapable of completely understanding reality.Images here are the reflections of reality; lines, shapes and colours are in themselves without meanings until perceived and signified.

‘Now-here’ is a visual exploration of my experience and understanding of the transitional world between place and space. These ideas are in parallel; objective and subjective, limited and unlimited, producing physical and conceptual reality.

 

Here and There (2013)

‘Here and There’ (2013)

Space and place are two similar but slightly different terms. They are the ideas in parallel; objective and subjective, limited and unlimited, and physical and conceptual reality which cannot be understood separately.

This series of works illustrate a transition between simultaneous materialistic and fictional reality, the deformed and distorted reality which is dependently constructed by my and viewer’s perceptions.

Untitled (2013)

“Sometimes I’m confusing the RL and SL. I don’t know where I am” – China Tracy, i.Mirror

A term Information Age has become popular since the invention of World Wide Web and personal computers in 1990s and we can now learn the information before the actual experiences. My work focuses at concepts of reality and unreality in relation to new media and digital culture. I started exploring the theme from ‘hikikomori’ phenomenon in Japan where people who are commonly immersed in the internet, computer games, anime and manga withdraw from society and confine themselves in their rooms which subsequently led me to study the popular culture of television and animation, then subliminal effects and sound signals as hidden languages for my work.

Subliminal effects are widely used in advertising: George Bush’s RATS campaign and Australian Coca Cola poster in 80s for famous banned examples. This proves the information we perceive everyday is naturally mere collections of modifiable visual and sound patterns, and physical reality transferred into digital media is no longer the same but altered reality. When our brains perceive such information unconsciously, how much can we trust ourselves, and how real the virtual can be?

China Tracy, an avatar of the Chinese artist Cao Fei, comments in i.Mirror her documentary film of an online role-playing computer game Second Life that any world is an abyss and to go to virtual world is the only way to forget about the real darkness. My series as a whole became a sceptical and mediating piece to question our position at both physical and mind reality in this digital age.