This idea comes from my own experience. As someone who has struggled with depression and anxiety for three years, I have been exposed to many misconceptions about mental illness in my life. Mental illnesses are not short-lived negative emotions, such as a momentary bad mood or too much stress, but real illnesses. They can affect people’s brains and even cause somatization symptoms.

I know that there are many artists in society now who also make art about mental health, and in talking to tutor she provided me with some existing examples. I really like The Big Anxiety Art Festival, where artists document their work using visual art and virtual reality art, etc. Using visuals to express psychological factors is a difficult thing to do, but the fact that artists can now realise and perfect this challenge is, in my opinion, a great thing.

The Big Anxiety – People – Arts – Science

If this topic is chosen as a theme, I hope that this exhibition will introduce mental health issues to a wider audience. To dispel misconceptions and make people more aware of the causes and symptoms of mental illness. I hope that people will become more aware of the mental state of those around them and create a warmer, more humane environment.

This is not an easy topic and I am not sure how many people would like to participate and experience it. Mental illness is also very personal, and it’s a question of whether or not it engages the audience’s empathy. At the same time it is a sensitive subject. How to plan the exhibition, what kind of exhibits to select and how to interact with the audience all require careful consideration and deliberation.

Contemporary and historical

Traditional art is perhaps seen by many as serious and meticulous. I once had this misunderstanding of traditional art, but despite this period, traditional art is also beautiful to me. The original idea of this theme was to make more people appreciate the beauty of traditional art.

As a native Chinese, I know that there are many of our traditional arts that are not well known or even misunderstood as the culture of another country. Is it possible for us to breathe new life into these traditional arts, providing them with new forms while maintaining their traditional forms, in order to prevent the traditional arts from being lost to the ages.

A mobile game I was playing once posted a single song called Daydaydream, which used an electric erhu with an electric pipa for accompaniment. Most contemporary pop music is based on electric guitars, electric basses, drums and electronic pianos. The use of traditional Chinese instruments in composing is a rarity, but at the same time it has achieved amazing results.

But the challenge is that traditional art is such a broad topic that where to focus and from where to land is the first problem to be solved, and the most difficult point to carry out this topic.

Childhood

This idea came to me after a tutorial with my tutor. Of the three topics, childhood should be the one that resonates most with the audience. Not everyone is concerned with mental health and history, but everyone has had a childhood.

The idea actually came from the introduction of a horror game I saw recently. The game is called Feet In The Snow and is a horror suspense game inspired by nightmares. Being inspired by dreams, the game was deliberately made by the author to be illogical. Although horror does not fit in with most people’s childhood, childhood memories, due to the incomplete development of the child’s brain, also appear illogical and dreamlike in our memories. At the same time, games and childhood are both so whimsical. We rarely have the concept of the impossible in childhood, children think that everything is possible, and this is also true in the world of gaming.

https://abstract-machine.itch.io/feet-in-the-snow

(As this is a horror game, the webpage may cause discomfort, so please click and view with caution.)

In the weird sprint of my themes course, which looked at the development and application of liminal space, I mentioned that the popularity of liminal space among the Generation Z crowd might come from its similarity to childhood. Both childhood and liminal space lack the concept of time and change; childhood is forever framed in memory and liminal space is artificially framed in pictures; they are both constant. Children’s ability to distinguish between subject and object is also different from that of adults, and the absence of a subject in the liminal space, where there is only an object, also gives the impression of returning to one’s own childhood and creates a sense of nostalgia.

If I were to choose childhood as a theme, it would be the most relaxed of the three, and I would prefer to make it more interactive than an exhibition displaying exhibits. I would perhaps collect elements or objects that people think of as childhood and place them in the exhibition to make the audience feel more involved.