SISYPHUS HAPPY One must imagine Sisyphus Happy—Albert Camus
Xuetong Wang MICA ILP 2020 Thesis Book
Content Me
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Between First Year and Second Year
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Game, Food, Picture Book & Problems
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Something New
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Wordless Comic
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Absurd
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RISO Print
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Exhibition Preparation
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Without Exhibition
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Happy Package
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Me Hi, I am Tong, I am an illustrator. It’s really hard to define myself and style because I keep changing and I love new things. I like happy things, I like sad things, I like weird things, I like normal things, I like shapes, I like lines, I like traditional media, I like digital drawing. Among all those amazing things in the world, I keep changing. The only constant is I treat illustration as a communicate method visually and conceptually. I take beauty, accuracy and interesting as a stable policy. Web: tongw.me ins: @tong_illus Weibo: TONG_WWWW
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Between First Year & Second Year It was 100 days vacation, The only thing I wanted to do is fully relax after first years’ intense schedule. While there was another thing that need to be done before going back to school, which was thesis proposal. It’s always been hard for me to find the topic because I am interested in all different kinds of things and thesis is an important year long project that I can’t just randomly pick one. I kept thinking until the week before deadline. One of my friend was starting a business about room escape and she was writing stories about murder. She asked me for collaboration, which intrigued me a lot. Under the pressure of time limits, I decided to make a murder mystery game. Topic wise, It was a completely new zone for me because I didn’t play a lot of games. And media wise, I was getting boring with my usual photoshop style and I was willing to try something new.
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Game, Food, Picture Book and Problems Topic wise, It was a food-related murder story happened in a restaurant, 6 people with different identities were involved in the case. Form wise, it was a picture book with mystery solving games inside. Clues were hidden in the texts and pictures. My intention was to let readers understand the story gradually and restore the truth Step by step by solving those mysteries. While as I went deeper, things went harder. I faced a lot of problems after I let some people actually play it. First, in terms of the difficulties of the mysteries, readers gave me totally different feedbacks. Second, it was really hard to find the balance between game and story. If I make game parts harder, people get lost easily in the story. If I make story clear, then game parts were easier and boring. Because of the problems, I started revising the structure and language until a month later. I finally decided to change a topic for thesis. Because I wanted to focus more on how to use illustration to communicate ideas rather than idea itself. Thus the project stopped at the middle of October 2019.
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Something New
Again, I was back to the beginning. Started thinking something new. And one day when I was eating strawberries, there was a fun short story popping into my head. I saw the seeds on strawberries looked like they were nails hammered into the wall. I recorded this idea as several panels and suddenly I Remembered the Riso comic project I did in the first year. I want to do something similar to that. Staring with strawberry, I use 12 panels to show the idea and turned out to be good. At that time, I didn’t know how to define my ideas, it didn’t really a story, it was more like the key frames of an animation and I had no idea what was the meaning of that. I still decided to go with that because the strawberry comic made my happy and I wanted to make more.
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Wordless Comic Starting from November, I kept generating new ideas and finishing one comic each week. They are all wordless and in 12 panels. Other than structure similarity I didn’t find the related meaning behind those comics. And during the guest critiques, they also brought me the question that they don’t understand the meaning of my comics. They are fun but nonsense. Around the end of February 2020, I finished 12 of them and I decided to stop here. I started to think the meaning behind my comics and I asked people for feedbacks to see if I can get some ideas from that.
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Absurd Absurd / Meaningless / Fun / Endless / Life / Nonsense / Nothingness
This set of comics breaks the boundary between reality and surreality. Everything seems to happen reasonably, but at the same time, it is unreasonable. The panels of comics are repeated, even endless cycle, like our mechanical daily life, day after day, absurd and meaningless. But it continues like this. It's like a long dream, but only a few seconds in real life. Over and over again, Never end.
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Albert Camus said: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.�Disharmony, irrational and meaningless . In the infinite cycle of daily life, people gradually lose their foothold and sense of security in the time series, and fall into a situation of contradiction, hopelessness and disorder. It's absurd and nothingness; Eternal cycle and eternal meaninglessness. Human existence starts from absurdity and accidence, without any purpose, as if a piece of white paper exists in this world, without any standard to reference, and without any value to follow. Therefore, human is definitely free, but this kind of freedom brings absurdity and nihilistic agonizing. But we can find meaning on the basis of admitting this fact. People can establish their own essence and complete the definition of self by choosing, even if not choosing, it is also a choice. If there is no scale, then create the scale, if there is no standard, then set up the standard. In such process, people gradually complete the endowing of self meaning, free from the absurdity and nothingness of existence, and find their own meaning again.
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RISO Print The process of RISO print is also mechanical repetition while technically every RISO printed page is a little bit different. Thus the whole printing process also deepen the meaning of absurdism of the comics. Slightly shifted from the routine is the charm of life. Color: Red, Yellow, Blue, Black, Green, Mint, Orange, Florescent Orange, Florescent Pink, Purple.
Paper : Mohawlk eggshell white, 80lb cover Size: Letter size (8.5� x 11�)
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Fries
red/yellow/mint/black
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12
Banana
yellow/mint/black
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Nail
florescent pink/green/black
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Onion
florescent orange/green/purple/black
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Breakfast
red/yellow/blue/black
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Popcorn
yellow/blue/red/black
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22
Bubble gum
florescent orange/blue/black
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Bubble gum
florescent orange/blue/black
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26
Strawberry
red/blue/black
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Fortune cookie
florescent pink/yellow/purple/black
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Moon
florescent orange/purple/yellow/black
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Rain
red/mint/blue/black
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Exhibition Preparation My
16’ 9”
13’ 5”
Wa ll 10’
13 ¼”
32 ¾”
11’ 6” 53”
11’ 7”
Short Ledge
35’ 9”
marquee
7’9”
28’ 1”
RAMP 7’ 1”
13’8”
Campus Safety desk
5’ 4 ½”
= Display Window (outside building)
art ed stairs
6’ 8”
6’3”
= I Beam
18’ 2”
17’ 5”
20’ 3”
16’6”
= gallery wall
28’ 2 ”
big area
high gallery
12”
(Open Stairs)
19’ 4”
Fox Window (large) = 176” (h) x 109” (w) x 24” (d) (ledge) Each window panel is 20” (h) x 26” (w)
18’ 7”
Fox Window (small) = 101” (h) x 67” (w)
ibit io n 28’
back area
Gallery Entrance
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Exh
12’8”
7’3”
Sisyphus Happy
Wall Text
One must imagine Sisyphus Happy - Albert Camus. Sisyphus Happy is a series of surreal wordless comics under the theme absurdism, printed in Riso. Life is mundane, things happens mechanized day by day. Just like Sisyphus, repeating forever the meaningless tasks of pushing the boulder up to the hill, only to see it roll down again. We can’t help asking what is the meaning of life? But never get the answer from the unreasonable silent world. The essence of life and world is meaningless, thus, give us an opportunity to meaning our life by finding fun and sparkling moments and choose to be happy.
Exhibition Plan The exhibition plan is to select one pannel from each comic and print them in large square. Then mount them on foam cores and lined them up according to color. Exhibition in this way can give people a peek of each comic and intrigue them to read the whole series, which is printed in Riso and placed on the other side of the wall.
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Without Exhibition One week before installation, The exhibition was cancelled because of Corona Virus. It was a shame that we cannot show our work of one year efforts in the gallery. Under the circumstance of globally quarantine. I chose to exhibit my work virtually .
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The inspiration of Sisyphus Happy is from absurdism and is aim to trigger people’s thinking about mechanized daily life and provide a little bit happiness. Hopefully this comic series can also become a reminder and psychological suggestion that we have the choice to be happy, and can lead people to choose a more positive life attitude.
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Happy Pack Happy Pack is a gift pack, which includes fries, banana soda, gummy teeth and finger, onion ring, salted egg chips, pop corn, bubble gum, soda water, strawberry soda, fortune cookie, banana candies and mint soda. After online exhibition , I decides to explore the possibility of this series. Since the intention is to provide happiness to people, I started to think about how can I use this comic to provide a little bit happiness to life. And according to the theme of each comic, I had an idea of Happy Pack, which include 12 different snacks, drinks and candies. Comics can be designed on packages. The combination of comics and food can provide happiness both mentally and physically.
Fries
Onion Ring 39
Fortune Cookie
40
Salted Egg chips
Popcorn
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Banana Soda
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Strawberry Soda/ Mint Soda
Soda Water
Gummy Teeth and Finger Banana Candie
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Bubble Gum
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