Project 1 process / swatch dv2011 pattern, art, design & Archite cture Toh Hui Ling Gillian (u1030449g) ay2013-14 semester I
I. con cept
My concept is about the nature of insatiable consumption - the drive to desire foods/ objects/pursuits that are superficially appealing but ultimately have little substance. Concentrating on the feeling that hunger is renewable, endless, inevitable, and how that creates an anxiety about emptiness that contemporary culture tries, futilely, to fill. An updating of the hungry ghost trope from religious mythos (e.g. Tibetan Buddhist Yidak: “Even should they finally manage to swallow a little something, it cannot allay the great hunger and insatiable appetite�).
re sea rch
Hungry ghosts through the ages (and religions) I started researching off the jumping point of the Hungry Ghost Festival, which led me to the recurring trope of hungry ghosts throughout the different historical religions. And an interesting common thread that I found was the idea that if you are greedy in life, you’ll get stuck that way in the afterlife too.
Grigori/Nephilim (Judaism)
Yidak (Tibetan Buddhism)
“But you from the beginning were made spiritual, possessing a life which is eternal, and not subject to death for ever... The spirits of the giants... shall cause lamentation. No food shall they eat; and they shall be thirsty; they shall be concealed, and shall not rise up against the sons of men, and against women; for they come forth during the days of slaughter and destruction.”
“By Yidak they mean a certain kind of living being that has a very small and narrow mouth exactly like the eye of a needle, and a neck that is similarly narrow and constricted. Their eyes emit noxious and fiery exhalations that dry everything up, and their stomachs are huge and capacious…Their principal torments are a perpetual and extreme hunger and painful thirst. Their skin and flesh is dry and scorched like a firebrand half burned and quenched, their hair is bristly, their mouths extremely dry, and their tongues are like those of exhausted and thirsty dogs... To relieve their hunger they run around from place to place in search of something to eat, suffering the intolerable pain of total exhaustion and finding nothing; or if they do find something, it is either instantly consumed by sudden flames or changed into the most revolting and stinking filth so that it is totally inedible. Even should they finally manage to swallow a little something, it cannot allay the great hunger and insatiable appetite of their huge bellies, and instead exacerbates their torment all the more, increasing beyond measure the inconsolable and incurable pain… Such a birth and the enormous sufferings that accompany it are primarily the penalty and punishment for avarice.”
(1 Enoch, XV – XVI)
Preta (Buddhism, Hinduism) Excessive possessiveness or desire in a previous life --> preta, a sort of hungry ghost. “They stand outside our dwellings, at our windows, at the corners of our streets; they stand at our doors, revisiting their old homes. When abundant food and drink is set before them, by reason of the past sins of these departed ones, their friends on earth remember them not.” (Petavatthu, Khuddaka pátha XII-XIII, trans. R.C. Childers)
(Desideri, 2010, p349-250)
Hungry Ghost (Chinese Buddhism)
Gaki (Japanese Buddhism)
“[Lady Leek Stem] becomes a Preta, a Hungry Ghost. If in the distance she hears the sound of water, by the time she gets near it has turned into a river of revolting pus. Food the moment it touches her lips turns into fire... She implores Mu-lien to take his begging-bowl and collect some rice for her... But all the torments of Hell have not cured her of her inveterate covetousness and greed. She is terrified that the other Hungry Ghosts will snatch away the food.”
“the burning of any kind of incense is supposed to summon viewless spirits in multitude. These come to devour the smoke. They are called Jiki-ko-ki, or “incense-eating goblins;” and they belong to the fourteenth of the thirty-six classes of Gaki (pretas) recognized by Japanese Buddhism. They are the ghosts of men who anciently, for the sake of gain, made or sold bad incense; and by the evil karma of that action they now find themselves in the state of hunger-suffering spirits, and compelled to seek their only food in the smoke of incense.”
(Waley, 1960, p231-232).
(Hearn, 1906, p54-55)
Bottomline: Don’t be greedy, or you might be condemned to an existence of eternal hunger, and also pus.
Key ideas Food becoming recreational> nutritional: Satiate pleasure > physical hunger Consumerism made palatable by its colourful candy coating of pop Anxiety about emptiness
“Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.” —John Steinback, ‘Sweet Thursday’, 1954.
influ ences/ mood board
Desserts
Japanese Street Fashion
I feel like desserts are the ultimate expression of greed in food - they hold an almost universal appeal, and they’re a class of junk food: high pleasure, high calories, low nutrition and fairly short-term satisfaction. This expresses the kind of superficially appealing but essentially empty I want to capture.
I love harajuku street fashion because the colours are insane and it looks neurotic there’s a lot of crazy print on print, almost like an anti-aesthetic, and playfulness or kitsch-iness that I find attractive in a fun way. I modelled my colour scheme after their saturated neons and pastels.
Illustration by pixiv artist 雝Q
sketches
Colouring Styles
ii. col ours
Attempt #1 Pen tool vector Originally I tried applying colour to the linework with the pen tool in the popular vector style, because I wanted to use flat colour so as to let the linework shine through in the final image. However, I found this to look too clean and rigid in a way that was dull and lifeless. Furthermore, it was far too timeconsuming, although it did allow me to vary colours easily. I was also bothered by how stark and sombre the black lines looked, so I started using coloured outlines instead.
Attempt #2 Digital painting Here is a quick colour test I did on the cupcake to experiment with colour treatment and scheme. It’s far looser, with its colouroutside-the-lines hapzardness, which gives it a more superficial pop feel. I also liked the sort of “trashy“ gradient created by the soft brushes. I experimented with using a subtle, muted khaki instead of using straight up bright, saturated colours, because I thought it would be a subtle distancing step from true pop packaging - another way to make my work evoke a that look but make it ever so slightly off somehow.
Preliminary colour moodboard
Iii. mo tifs
Iii. swa tches
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Iv. appli cation
x
gildebeest