Open Dump

by TING Ho Yee

My idea of the art work is by photo taking. I would like to take photos of English characters from A to Z from any object, anything that creates those English characters randomly when we look in some angel but not made by human deliberately. The English character could made up of few unrelated objects but when we look at some angles they may overlapped and present the English word, as long as it is not made by human deliberately to present the character, it can be captured and put in the artwork.

There is a condition in taking these English characters, which is taking each English character from one country. The English name of the country determine which English character should explore in the city and take photo with, for example when I go to China, I should take the character “C”, when I go to United State, I should take photo with character “U”. That means, I have to travel at least 26 cities to collect all these character for the artwork. Here is a list for reference of which English character should take photo with in that country:
A = AUSTRIA, B = BRAZIL, C = CHINA, D = DENMARK, E = EGYPT, F = FRANCE, G = GREECE, H = HUNGARY, I = INDONESIA, J = JAPAN, K = KOREA, L = LUXEMBOURG, M = MALAYSIA, N = NETHERLANDS, O = OMAN, P = POLAND, Q = QATAR, R = ROMANIA, S = SWITZERLAND, T = THAILAND, U = UNITED STATES, V = VIETNAM, W = Warsaw, X = XINJIAPO , Y = YEMEN, Z = ZAMBIA

In an individual level, my motivation of making this art work is to explore cities in a different way, looking carefully at those normal objects like buildings, street lights, trees etc anything that surrounds us and find out those implicit English character which we may ignore. Sometimes when we travel another city, we may just visit those tourist spot which the tourist guide prepared for us, and that just without novelty. By taking these photos, I can explore the cities in a different way, in a way that others do not look the city at this way before. I hope by collecting these English characters can raise people awareness in everything around us. The photos are entirely unique as we have to find out the characters by ourselves.
In a global level, the ultimate goal is hope to present the idea of “We are the world”. Even though people in the world are in different skin color, living in different location separate by the sea, having different culture etc, these are just physical obstacles and should not be an obstacle to hinder us. Just like the collection process of these characters, although it is a very long way to collect all those words, it is still possible as long as we pay time and effort to collect them. And when we link the characters together, it just symbols different countries in the world are linked up together, in one unity, without war and in peace.

My expected final art work is after collecting all the photos, all photos of English character would be hang up on the ceiling and placed them in order and in the outline of pigeon. Then light will be spotted on the photos, the photos will project a pigeon shadow on the wall. And all the characters collected in different place in the world will be linked up together, and also the shadow of a pigeon outline in the wall which is generally acknowledged as the symbol of world peace.