Nowhere Fast by Diana H. Chu

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

NOWHERE FAST Diana H. Chu

Idea Book First Year MFA Illustration Practice Maryland Institute College of Art Fall 2016 - Spring 2017

HOWDY

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

We are lost, must Wizard a track through our own screaming weed. — Gwendolyn Brooks

This ‘idea book’ contains more than just ideas. It contains seeds and trash, moments of lucid depth, crumb trails (and actual crumbs), a lot of noise, a punch of real feeling here and there, but mostly just marks in a quest for truth. All bound into a small block of proof that I am, in fact, alive. Thanks for sharing this moment in time with me, right smack dab at the center of everything (at least from where I’m standing — scooch over, will ya?), reporting on my first year at MICA’s MFA Illustration Practice program whose heart ferociously beats in The Greatest City in America. Happy trails, hon. Diana April, 2017

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

Inexhaustive list of appropriate ways to interact with this compendium of text / images:

Drop it Spread it Bounce it Take it once a day with food Walk it Curl it Flip to a page and shut your eyes immediately Thumb its pages three times Put too many bookmarks in it Underline everything Read it chronologically Archive it Draw on it Find the faces Stack it Drop it again Get every page wet but one Tell everyone about it Shun it Hug it Press it Sit it down in a corner and tell it off

AUGUST

2 016 8

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

IMAGE HARVEST

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

I’ve made lists of what I like and don’t like to draw before. Like: Old faces. Spindly extrusions. Clothing with odd silhouettes and plenty of draping. Dislike: Architecture. Landscapes. Bovines. Image harvest asked for a step beyond that, beyond form and simple categories. We were challenged to mine the mind, follow trails, and open doors to ideas we have squirreled away for one reason or another, hopefully to discover fresh territory worth exploring that remains connected to our deeper selves. The fact that artists harbor certain leanings, visually, but also in terms of content, confirms just how entrenched in our singular experience we are. I think ‘image harvesting’ is something I will continue to do for life. This project morphed three times; from a small zine discussing my feeling of vulnerability as a new, female resident of Baltimore proper, and how this connected to the larger history of police brutality as well as uniform and presentation of the self (“What should I wear / what should I fear?”), then onto a black and white zine about “Baltimorean Firsts” that integrated typography into images in a folk-style way, and finally culminated in the French epinal & broadside-inspired diptych of Maryland Symbols and Historical Baltimorean Debuts that I presented at our program’s Fall show of the same name.

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

PAPER CUTTING

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

With paper engineering, I was interested in capturing the mundane yet daily frustration of rummaging in a rucksack for my keys. Layered with the anxiety of feeling vulnerable in Baltimore, I produced a palm-sized tunnel book, inset into a round box with a peephole on top. At the very bottom was a painting of house keys, but also a physical set hidden in the bottom of the box to give both weight and sound cues to the viewer of what they are hoping to find under all the riff raff.

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

D.FAB

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

Digital fabrication and laser-cutting meant learning a program called Rhino, using its x, y planes and creating mathematically scalable forms (whose perimeters use ‘splints’ derived from physical architectural methods to support the underbelly of a curve, unlike vectors who uses anchors) to cut from masonite, wood, acrylic, etc. I was most interested in using this technology to return to something less rigidly formal and that could move ‘fluidly’. Tibetan woven tiger rugs have also been a strong fascination of mine — would you believe me if I told you I think this is a portrait of my alter ego?

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

SEPTEMBER

2 016 40

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

OCTOBER

2 016 52

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

SEWING & BINDING

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

A plush banana with embroidered face. Nothing terribly deep. Just a dose of potassium and fun. The inner fabrication was sourced from a 22in-waist terrycloth vintage skirt from Hampden.

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

NOVEMBER

2 016 62

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

MATCH BOOKS

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

The prompt: create a matchbook-sized visual + one word synopsis of a novel of your choosing. The response: a scroll-book about Wise Blood by Flannery O’ Connor. If you are unfamiliar with the work, I conveninently wrote a small blurb of the book below: “Wise Blood” tells the story of American war veteran and preacher’s son Hazel Motes and his search for moral truth in the eccentric 1940’s South. Motes navigates increasingly bizarre events as he comes to realize the paradox of his own crisis of faith. The author Flannery O’Connor utilizes themes of literal and spiritual blindness, redemption, and falsehood to portray her characters’ struggles to find out what it means to exist outside of the very thing that defines everything they know. I love the scroll-book format for its simple, manual element of surprise, and hope to find a fitting opportunity to employ its mechanics in the future.

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

DECEMBER

2 016 78

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

ART MARKET

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

Although one may not often associate “cowboys” with “poetry”, these cards hope to investigate this paradox in a quiet and surprising way. Each set of mini pop-up cards features black and red linocut prints themed around the American frontier myth, cowboy culture and Southwestern desert life. For $15 you receive three palm-sized cards. Their size makes them unique in their portability as well as evoking their appeal as lucky talismans. As an illustrator interested in exploring how pioneers of the Western frontier would have confronted moments of unbearable hardship and sublime beauty all at once, I am mixing naturalistic and man-made imagery in a way that puts nature and civilization in tension. Each card evokes surprise upon revealing the image within. These juxtapositions relate to how poetry pairs unrelated words to describe the intangible. The prints feature bold yet organic linework, lending them folkloric framework and a handcrafted look. The purely pictorial form and interactive nature of the simple paper mechanism widens the intended audience age range, inviting viewers to engage with each card over and over again. Alone or as a set, the cards can be easily sent in the mail (supplementing a letter), used as bookmarks, or stand on a desk as objets d’art.

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

JANUARY

2 017 88

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

SILLY CITY Organize, organize, organize. For a majority of our timeline, I was only interested in taking what we were given and designing it to the height of ease and comprehension. Aesthetics resolutely aside, I tackled repagination, organizing information into a few charts and tables, and using the lowest printing capability as the standard for reproduction of the final lesson plan I produced. If anything, this client project showed me how willing I was, and mostly specific to this situation, to not imprint a voice or point of view beyond the parameters of the need. I was much more teacherfocused than gearing my illustrations to activate children. To be honest, I was unwilling to delve deep into my experience as a child, learning within both American public institutions and private ones abroad in Hong Kong. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve suppressed a lot of it. I created a cohesive set of over 100 individual spot illustrations that ranged from graphite & ink to colored-pencil line drawings in the brand palette of our client, Fresh Artists.

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

100

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

101

102

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

103

FEBRUARY

2 017 104

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

105

106

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

107

108

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

109

ANIMATION

110

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

Hui and I are two “hai pa” — two “scaredy-s” (an expression that frequently escapes Hui’s lips!). We are also two scardeys who happen to share a penchant for paper silhouettes and bold color, strange beats, and the freedom of being young at heart. Just have a listen to “Junun Brass” by Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express… and let the feeling fill you to the tippy top!

111

112

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

113

114

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

115

116

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

117

118

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

119

120

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

121

MARCH

2 017 122

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

123

PATTERN A long forgotten lunch. Hero (opposite page), secondary (right) and supporting (left).

124

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

125

126

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

127

128

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

129

HAND LETTERING

130

This pussy grabs back! ¡No se puede! NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU Resist! He’s not my president! Show me what democracy looks like! He’s orange, he’s gross, he lost the popular vote! My body, my choice! Hands too small, can’t build a wall! No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here! This pussy grabs back! ¡No se puede!

Resist! He’s not my president! Show me what democracy looks like! He’s orange, he’s gross, he lost the popular vote! My body, my choice! Hands too small, can’t build a wall! No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here! This pussy grabs back! ¡No se puede! Resist! He’s not my president! Show me what democracy looks like! He’s orange, he’s gross, he lost the popular vote! My body, my choice! Hands too small, can’t build a wall! No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here! This pussy grabs back! ¡No se puede! Resist! He’s not my president! Show me what democracy looks like! He’s orange, he’s gross, he lost the popular vote! My body, my choice! Hands too small, can’t build a wall! No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here! This pussy grabs back! ¡No se puede! Resist! He’s not my president! Show me what democracy looks like! He’s orange, he’s gross, he lost the popular vote! My body, my choice! Hands too small, can’t build a wall! No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here! This pussy grabs back! ¡No se puede! Resist! He’s not my president! Show me what democracy looks like! He’s orange, he’s gross, he lost the popular vote! My body, my choice!

131

132

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

133

134

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

135

APRIL

2 017 136

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

137

138

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

139

140

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

141

SELFDIRECTED Satisfyingly enough, I am most confident about this project compared with anything else I’ve made all year; I enjoyed the process, felt as if the images I made were appropriate for the content and also carry a fresh look (non-derivative, felt authentic), and most significantly, I overcame my hesitancy to tackle sensitive topics / personal narrative through comics. The logistics of selfdirection came naturally. It was how I arrived at the content that felt like the “real work”. Ideas of returning to nature, camp, discovering the sublime, fleeing urbanity to seek transcendence in the wilderness (alone, but finding spiritual truth…), the american landscape as a metaphor for frontiers of the self… these thoughts were brewing well before this project began. I was reading John Ruskin and Barbara Novak. I was looking back at Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. I pitched a semi-fictional guide to finding transcendence, for discovering your authentic self, by going out on a roadtrip. I discovered that some of what I was proposing was simplifying a very broad and muddy philosophy. It was seen as didactic and cult-ish. To my dismay, I found that my intent to connect with ‘everyone’ by going ‘general’ and trying to universalize this philosophy was not the way to connect with others. It was the opposite, in fact; I needed to approach it idiosyncratically. After an intensely catalytic bout of conversations with peers and professors, coupled with lots of writing and reading about Outsider Art over the course of three short days, I turned a corner and decided to pursue personal narrative. Why am I so fixated on going out into nature to find “transcendence”? What am I truly looking to escape? I want, and have wanted practically all my life, to disassociate from my body. To be free of not others’ gaze, but my own. Avoiding mirrors is just a surface symptom of the body dysmorphia I have been living with and have folded into my normal routines — it is nothing I hold pridefully or with disdain. It’s as dark and sexy a topic to me as a recipe for white bread. It is so flatly flush with my identity that I presumed it was disinteresting to even mention or talk about. Body dysmorphia registers on the obsessive-compulsive scale, not the anorexic or narcissistic; my obsession with fashion 142

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

and the reason I wear make-up every morning is not selfaggrandizing but to “normalize” my appearance… out of respect to all those who have to bear my face every day. I move around in public with this intense self-consciousness (who doesn’t? Not sure.) coupled with an apologetic resignation about the fact that my face is the one I was born with. I knew this subject was too large to address, so I narrowed it down to a phenomenon I encounter regularly, condensed to just one line: I forget what I look like after watching a movie. What I intended to be a 6-8 page zine turned into a 36 page comic. I want somehow to continue this momentum into Thesis year. To be continued, indeed.

143

144

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

145

146

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

147

148

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

149

150

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

151

152

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

153

154

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

155

156

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

157

I could not have had such a rich and rewarding experience without the infinite wisdom of Kimberly Hall, our spirit guide, the one who asks the hard questions and sees you ‘in the clear the light of day.’ I would also like to extend a very special thanks to our program Director, Whitney Sherman, for her killer intuition and verve for our individual successes. Your dedication and countless hours spent on cultivating an illustration ‘frontier’ is felt deeply every day. Thank you, both. And to my cohort, Ben, my parents, and Yukon; the debt is all mine. “Nowhere Fast” Idea Book by Diana H. Chu All rights reserved, 2017 www.dianahchu.com El Sicko Poet. Shaman. Cowboy. Since 1990 Maryland Institute College of Art, MFA Illustration Practice Baltimore, MD Printed in USA

158

NOWHERE FAST / DIANA H. CHU

159

160