Wong Ching Man, Build // Unbuild
wood, acrylic on canvas
The shape of Build // Unbuild resembles my own body and the drawings on every wood pieces portray my unconsciousness.
I have always been curious about how my personality and thoughts have been established and shaped. This project was mainly inspired by the Freudian concepts, psychoanalysis and unconsciousness. The mysterious unconscious mind exerts immense influence on the formation of mindsets. The unconscious world comprises of all kinds of thoughts and ideas, including dangerous ones. These ideations might not easily come into conscious awareness since ego is the guard in our mind to avoid these concepts popping up in our consciousness, yet thoughts could be expressed freely through dreams without ego's intervention. I was amazed by how our mind functions and the obscurity. Dated back when Freud introduced the idea of psychoanalysis, jotting down dreams is also the initial step, to unearth the fragmented thoughts in the unconscious state. Dreams serve as a window to this dark corner and start the communication within oneself.
Learning from surrealism and automatism, my drawings employ irrational settings and included both my dreams and automatic drawings, which captures thoughts and images without conscious interruption. I did not deliberately interpret these pictures, but the process of preparing these pictures allows me to talk to my inner self and contemplate thoughts. The associations of my dreams might not be the same as my genuine latent dream-thoughts. So, it was more like a journey to discover and explore my dark corner where stores sensitive, personal and dangerous ideas. These ideations do not have any absolute definition, but the exploration lends me a hand to have a more comprehensive and vivid perception of my unconscious mind.
The work encourages the action of un-build as well. Viewers are welcome to take out pieces of the wood to look at the drawings freely. The goal of my work is to highlight communications within oneself. There is no definite interpretation of the paintings and we could never comprehend the dream scenarios as what it truly means, instead, I hope the audience feel the emotions embodied in the personal pictures and to provoke reviewing and talking within the audiences’ inmost mind as we do not often spend time to do so. And there is still plenty of obscure parts in our mind that we have not visited yet worth-exploring.
Process of Build // Unbuild making of
Sketches
Draft
The design of the body shape developed from a rough draft. By measuring and calculating the proportions of the wood body, a more precise outline of the shape was formed.
Along the woodcrafting process, I readjusted a lot to get a better and more dynamic shape of the wood body sculpture.
Front view
Side view
Rough and raw sketches of the dreams were recorded. Not everyday I was able to remember those dreams and draw them out. It took time to jot down all these 25 pieces of my dream scenarios.
Woodcraft making of
1. Use bandsaw to cut out the rough shape of each slices of wood
2. Use table polishing machine to polish the edges to form smooth curves
3. Use sand paper to rub out the concave parts
4. Use polishing machine to polish the surface of the wood. Repeat several times with different roughness of the sand paper.
