Longing……For……For……For……

The Virtual Mah-jong House-Life’s A Long Game

Whilst on my last summer visit in china, I stayed at my girlfriends best friend’s house in Wen Zhou south of China where she wanted me and my girlfriend’s help to renovate her new apartment and wanted to turn it into an after school homework centre. It was quite interesting time there to meet her friend and other members of her family who also helped out with things.

She wanted me and my girlfriend to help gather new students by handing out leaflets to the children’s parents and the free cups and balloons to their children to help promote the new after school homework business, it was quite good fun but had to get use to the early waking up in the morning which after a while I was beginning to get use to this routine. I got free meals and free stay by helping out with things and even got paid for teaching the students some English every day, was a good new experience for me and I hope to do this one day in China once I have finished my Master’s degree.

How did my mahjong game interest started?

Anyway me, my girlfriend, her best friend and two other teachers were so flushed and bored at the end of the day we decided to buy a Mah-jong set to have fun whenever we wanted after the long day of work. Luckily, I studied to play the game one year before I came to China in the summer so I pretty much know how to play it very well and even won three games against nine or ten different people.

How to play Mahjong

To me was quite an achievement in my life knowing that I have studied something difficult in Chinese and made me felt like a Chinese, even they were surprised about my talent in playing and always asked me to play. I have to say that this game is like the ultimate tester of the brain because of the symbols and numbers that you have to match up in threes it works like this.

(234 OOO 678 III 444 99)

As you can see in this example, you have to get 5 pairs of symbols and numbers or can just be 5 pairs of symbol or numbers on their own and you must finish on a double but it must be a matching pair.It’s not exactly difficult to play this game once someone tells you how to play and also playing it yourself on a phone for one year really helps alot.

Why did it inspired me to create this artwork?

This game has really inspired me so much that I just had to interpret it into an art work and was thinking of doing an installation using projectors to project people playing the game. I just had to try making one of my greatest memories become a reality in England so I began doing some research on some artists who use human figures in projecting and has given me some kind of idea on how to project people that does not involve the projector itself within the art work.

A Memory Trace coming to life?

As an artist I like to try hide the projectors out of the work somehow because I want this installation to look like it is a memory coming out of my brain like the viewer is inside my mind and is a fragment of what has become a past reality. This is how I want this to be seen and Is a bound of English and Chinese together playing a Chinese game in an English world where you have the different time zones and cultures. This is one of my best installations to date and I will keep trying to perfect this piece of work so that I can use some of this in my degree show.

A possible degree show?

One or two of my teachers have commented that I should use this for my degree show and I also think too but I will think very deeply on how to make this installation so much better and let things happen when the time comes. Will keep you posted on better results for this installation and will try to develop other installations that I do have in mind. Apologies for the bad quality of some photos as I had my laptop stolen from university and had to photocopy the ones in my sketchbook and got some photos from my girlfriend.

Why I drew these drawings and what inspired me?

These are some drawings and research that I captured on my visits in China before constructing my Chinese roof and was something that I was thinking about back in June 2014. doing these drawing of roofs has helped me decide what shape and size I want it and began making it before I left to go China in July.

My problematics with my Chinese roof

I wanted my plans to go according to most of these drawings which they did in the end but cannot get the tiles I planned so this drawback gave me the idea to just leave the skeletal framing becoming like a trace of a Chinese roof and not an exact Chinese roof. because of this end result it has enabled me to gain further ideas towards my degree show and I still plan to build the English roof in about 2 weeks time and see how that turns out. will carry on drawing out the plans for the English roof.

Why build a Chinese roof?

By the early stages of my final year of my degree I wanted to think about constructing an authentic Chinese roof with the original style of tiles and under skirt of wooden patterns. On my travels throughout the duration of my stay here, I was always eager to hunt down a few old towns or villages to witness the kind of lifestyle that these Chinese people have lived through.

When I was looking around I had noticed most of the time how colourful and intricate some under skirt wooden patterns have turned out. It just seems in my eyes that a lot of work has been involved with making these roofs but maybe for them it must be a piece of cake just like our English ways of building our English style roofs. Although seeing some Chinese roofs, seems that some are in fact replica and made up entirely to blend in with the surroundings or the fact that they need to use traditional roof tiles to make their Buddhist temples which I can understand completely.

problematics of my Chinese roof

Better still, as I really liked admiring these nice detailed roofs, I thought it would be quite nice to take something like this back with me but would be too heavy and maybe a bit costly too so I took on the opportunity to make my own small scale version Chinese roof. At first I was aiming on the idea to make a proper Chinese roof with all the trimmings like nicely glazed tiles and nice wooden colours for the wooden framing. My  biggest problem for me was that I could not afford the 70% extra import duty on top of the £600 tiles which would cost me over £1000 in total, I thought just for a student this would be too much and I even tried Kickstart program to raise the money but no joy.

problem resolved?

My confidence went a bit low at first and I had to think of plan B and turn it into slightly something else instead like something I may have seen before in china so I decided to make this roof not so obvious by not adding the roof tiles and just having the skeletal structure instead. The roof would become an incomplete structure like a fading memory trace. I have indeed seen many different buildings here in south of China like Wenzhou and Dongtou where you have a lot of unfinished buildings because either the building permission agreement has changed of they have left it too late through their bad weather to finish the job on time or they just could not keep up with their finances.

My plan of action!

Looking at all of these has given me a good inspiration and nice ideas to further my knowledge in the art side of things and I will keep developing art ideas towards my Chinese roof. next thing I want to try create is the English style roof which I will start in about 3 weeks time once i come back to England. Its like England and China are brought together again just like through Skyping but a more real reality that is just a trace of the objects and not the actual real thing.