ZIQI CHENG
Research Festival
Essay & Self-Publication about my drawing research
Essay & Self- publication
For the research festival, I presented research on my drawing practice through an essay and a self-publication.
With the title The Art of Imagery in Drawing: Landscape of Memory, I've been elaborating on the core idea of my drawing practice: "Landscape can be the subject of artistic creation as imagery carrying the artist's emotions and thoughts," and citing related artworks to discuss with my own drawing practice.
In addition to this, I have also made a book 'dark room.' as an aid to my writing, documenting the process of visualizing the landscapes and unobservable details I see and the process of transforming them into a drawing practice.
1. The Online Journal
I have chosen to present my research on drawing with an essay in this research festival because I believe that drawing should not just be an objective description of things but should be integrated into the artist's personal feelings and thoughts, so I hope to use writing to illustrate the core ideas and theories of my research more clearly while also practicing and improving my writing ability.
I describe the relationship between the creation of landscape as a kind of imagery and drawing in The Art of Imagery in Drawing: Landscape of Memory. The essay is divided into five chapters, which are as follows: What is landscape?; What is imagery?; Drawings in the Landscape: Picturesque; Landscape and Imagery Art: An Example of Chinese Landscape Painting; Landscape of Memory—the connotations ascribed to landscape in my drawing practice; Investigating the Meaning of Drawing.
The essay opens with a comprehensive exposition of the conceptual meanings and origins of the terms landscape and images, including the aesthetic idea of "picturesque" as extended from "landscape", and explains how landscape has aesthetic value and is related to art. It addresses the aesthetic value of landscapes and how they relate to art. Following that, I use Chinese landscape painting to demonstrate how landscape is used as imagery in artistic creation, and finally, I demonstrate the application and importance of landscape imagery in my drawing research by combining it with my practice, which is also the process of my ongoing research and exploration of the meaning of drawing.
2. Self-Publication
Some pages from 'dark room.', 2023
As a visual aid to my writing, I've named this publication "dark room." The darkroom is where photographs were developed during the time of the film camera, which is also similar to my drawing explorations. My drawing practice tends to be a subjective processing of objective things in my mind and then showing them through drawings, which are different and inaccurate from the real objects, so this darkroom refers to my subjective consciousness, the dark room that hides what I'm thinking about. To describe my creative thought process more clearly, I separated the booklet's contents into three sections: What’s in the camera? What’s in my sketchbook? What’s in my eyes? These three sections depict the mountains as they are in reality, as I drew them, and as I recall them. I hope that this booklet can be used as a visual aid in conjunction with my writing, both of which reflect the same idea: that the landscape can be processed by subjective consciousness into imagery for use in drawing.
All images used in the book are from my own art project: Mountain! Mountain! (2023).
Some pages from 'dark room.', 2023