Junyi Zhou
Senior Studio
The emotional quality of lines and colors within the two-dimensional space has always been the focus of my works. Lines have personalities. In the “lines and tension series”, which consists of five drawings with different qualities of lines, I explored how emotions are associated with lines. The drawing of three human figures is my favorite. Rendered in a frontal view, the figures are shaped with organic lines, through which the process of drawing was recorded. The lines are arbitrary, the figures are abstract, but the image is lively, and I see my own emotions reflected on their faces.
Colors are also emotional. But the symbolic meaning of colors seems to be more intriguing to me recently. When language, culture, religion, spirit, and history are all condensed in one particular color, this color becomes heavy. I made another series of drawings, all done in red and green, to see if any exciting reactions between them would happen. I chose red and green because they are always seen as opposed to each other. Red is often related to danger, stop, passion, and luck, while green is associated with life, go, calmness, and bad fortune. Complementary colors do not always generate tension, however. In one of the drawings, where both red and green are in low saturation, an unexpected sense of softness emerged. They blended into each other naturally in the hazy atmosphere. As I was looking at the drawing, I started to comprehend what’s investigated by Zhouyi--the positive and negative are inseparably interconnected. The so-called counterparts coexist and depend on each other, in the same way that the red and green blended together in the drawing.
In regard to the senior thesis project, inspired by a book named the color aesthetics in the Forbidden City, I made the fan painting series—Seeing. Eight paintings captured eight views in the Forbidden City, which is inferred by the intensive use of red, yellow, and green in the architecture. Installed in a circular way, the fan paintings create an incomplete environment. I want the audience to complete the environment by association. Hints are provided in the paintings, and what the rest of the space looks like is entirely open to interpretation. What the viewers would see is based on what they have seen. For example, while people close to nature would fill the rest of the space with garden scenes, people who are intensively exposed to architectures may continue building pavilions and walls to complete the environment. The audience and I are both involved in the completion of this work, and the ongoing collaboration would keep instilling vitality to it.
