The Pieces
2023.8
This project is one in which I focused on healing and encouraging the artist herself. The project itself transforms ancient museum artifacts into soft interactive art installations for children. The reason I chose to do this project was that I found Siyi to be an art student who is very nervous and afraid of making mistakes. She has strong illustration skills, her drawings are very precise, and she can accurately depict figures and objects while using colors in a standardized way. I wanted her to follow her intuition more in her creative process, and I wanted to introduce some intentional failure and uncertainty into her work. We chose museum objects—which are inherently serious subjects—as our focus. Additionally, since Siyi is a children's book illustration major, we hoped to engage directly with children through the project. Our goal was to scientifically and artistically integrate serious subject matter into early childhood education through art.
The first attempt at pattern making and sewing was a big challenge for Siyi. At this step, she already felt tremendous pressure and was unwilling to start. So I helped her find a studio of a craftsperson who is good at sewing, and we several people together learned and discussed pattern making. This was a workshop activity for Siyi, who is living in a city far away from her hometown, and she became more cheerful. Later she told me that her parents had not given any emotional support in her master's application; they just kept demanding that Siyi must get a good offer, so she had been under high pressure all along.
After that, we started trying to make carpets and large soft sculptures. The most difficult part was that Siyi needed to paint directly on the sculptures with acrylic without any sketches beforehand. Previously, she could only accept working from very detailed sketches before transferring. Unexpectedly, during the painting process, she suddenly had an emotional breakdown and started crying—she suddenly felt that her work was ugly. We tried to comfort her, but she thought we were just saying that and couldn't believe that the work itself was good. This was a challenge for me as an educator, and it was also the first time I encountered a student who couldn't like her own work. I considered having her redo it, but after reflection, I thought this was "emotional numbness" that appeared under Siyi's high‑pressure state—it might be a kind of depressive state, just like a person with depressive tendencies can't get out of a sad situation, even though the situation itself is not actually difficult for someone with normal emotions.
So I decided to guide her through this situation quickly—to move her out of it, rather than letting her sink into it. I gave her encouragement and told her to accept her numb emotions and creative block, spend two hours that night mechanically completing the work without caring about the result. After finishing, go to sleep as soon as possible, put the work out of her mind, rest for three days, and then we would bring the work to a beautiful environment and revisit whether she was satisfied with it. So on a sunny afternoon, we took her brightly colored carpet and the pair of hand‑painted cotton‑filled sculptures to a neighborhood full of children. We placed everything in the sunlight, and one by one, many children came over—they were clearly drawn to the soft, colorful objects. In the end, Siyi was very satisfied with the result. She felt that being liked by others was more important than liking her own work.
