Foundation of Form has always been the essential course content in the basic units of year one in Art and Design colleges and universities. The traditional unit of Foundation of Form basically focuses on training students’ observation and painting skills, as well as improving the understanding and the ability of mastering the form, proportion, structure, perspective, volume, space and so on. There is little involvement in the expansion of creative thinking, the exploration of multi-media and multi materials, the extension of forming problems from 2D space to 3D and 4D space, and how to come up with personnel opinions through reflection and in-depth study of the problem. Under the background of the continuous development of new technology and new materials, innovative talents who are interdisciplinary need to be cultivated with design subjects. Students need to innovate Chinese cultural characteristics with the perspectives of international art and design. This leads to a higher requirement for students from the beginning when studying the basic professional units of year one. Aiming at how to change the traditional thinking and convention of visual communication, professor Lin Lin divided the seven-week unit into three sections and five parts. This enabled students to gradually understand how innovative thinking develops, how the form and media need to be involved in design. From this experience, students were also able to learn the importance of teamwork.
Unit introduction:
Foundation of Form is a compulsory unit delivered in the first semester of year one in the institute of Creativity and Innovation. This unit aims at changing the inherent form thinking habits of the students before they came to the university by improving their imagination with the growing knowledge, expanding their thinking with brand-new form ideas, create various possibilities of visual elements in 2D and 3D spaces. This unit emphasizes the integration between objective cognition and subjective expression, so as to lay a strong foundation for the creative thinking, multiple presentation and media development of the professional units in year 3 and year 4.
Course Goals：
By studying this unit, students will be able to change the traditional and objective convention of visual communication, strengthen the observation, personalized understanding and associative visual expression of objects, understand the creative form, the application of materials and the spatial presentation of the form, and improve the communication ability of personalized visual information, so as to comprehensively develop the basic creativity and performance of visual communication.
Aims
1. Have a broader understanding of the works and creative methods of artists in different periods.
2. Learn to find the connections of designs in different types of art pieces during different historical periods.
3. Understand the creative form, the application of materials and the spatial presentation of developing form. Encourage the exploration of materials and the development of creative skills.
4. Involve ‘media’ into the design process and conceptual framework to develop the diversity of design.
5. Introduce a series of materials and creative methods to study and develop your ideas, and learn how to evaluate and reflect on the progress of your creation.
6. Learn how to work as a team and co-create your design.
The unit includes three sections: creativity and form, materials and form, space and form. These are the three sections discussed by the leading tutors of the teaching and research office before the commencement of the unit.
ⅠCreativity and Form
The first section of Creativity and Form, is divided into three steps. First of all, in order to break the students' inherent thinking habits for the form before they come to the university, three different kinds of art pieces are selected from three different historical periods: Egyptian mural, Picasso and John Stezaker. Students were asked to make comparison, analyze, discuss, and think about the characteristics and connections of the three kinds of art pieces in form.
Assignment 1 (topic: artificial person): each student takes 30 portrait photos and prints them into black and white pictures, then cuts them into regular strips (about 1 cm wide) and combines them to create a new portrait.
Requirements: think about what kind of ‘new’ portrait to create, and why it is ‘new’? What are the key words of design?
Assignment 2 (Research presentation): identify artists and designers with creative connections from different historical periods, think about their understanding of form, materials, creativity, space and other issues in their creation through in-depth research, and analyze the media characteristics of their art pieces.
Requirements: read widely and search resources from a wide range. The selection of artists is not limited to a specific media form. The connection and difference between them should be focused on.
students' designs
LIU Xinyi MA Jiankai
LIU Yingying QIAO Jie
PU Xiangshan LIU Tianyu
Lin Xufan LIN Jiayi
In the second step ofCreativityandForm, in order to help students understand the most basic idea of ‘point, line and plane’ from the perspective of different media forms and languages, the course started with the analysis of the basic theory and the designs of Kandinsky's ‘Point, Line and Plane’, the discussion regarding the visual language of three elements in the composition of 2D plane, and the research of the artistic characteristics of abstract visual elements with specific analysis. Following this, the discussion of point, line and plane range from painting to the application and embodiment in the fields of photography, architecture, book design, product design, public space, installation and image and so on, focusing on the display in different media, disguised development and spatial relationship of point, line and plane.
Assignment: take a picture and transform it to the abstract form of point, line and surface of the picture.
Requirements: drawn on computing paper, the transformation from concrete to abstract requires an application of the form of point, line and surface.
Students' design
PU Xiangshan
LIU Yingying
LU Wenbo
LIU Xiaopu
LV Yunman
In the discussion of the third step of Creativity and Form,the thinking of the energy transformation from print media to digital media and from text to image has been mentioned. By introducing Tanja Smith, a Dutch artist’s design ideas and art pieces, students were given the opportunities to think about the relationship between text, image and print media. We live in an era filled with image culture. We come across a large number of images at a very fast speed, but we do not have the chance to learn to read these images. In fact, we tend to forget that those images are used consciously by some people to manipulate us. Therefore，in the process of design，the relationship between text, image and media should be studied deeply, in an attempt to bridge the gap between reality and our perception of reality through the reconstruction of existing media.
Assignment: use newspapers, magazines and other publications as painting paper, interpret the relationship between text content and images, and recreate new images.
Requirement:consider the mutual relationship between text and image in the media era,and reflect the transformation of text and image content during the recreation process.
students' designs
LIU Kaiyue
LIU Xinyi
LIU Xinyi
LV Yunman
Ⅱ Materials and Form
The second section of Foundation of Form is about the relationship between materials and form. In the course of the first section, the materials have actually been brought into the process subconsciously. In particular, the application of different types of painting papers is required in the homework: such as printed photos, calculation paper, newspapers and magazines, etc. These are not common painting papers. In the discussion regarding designs based on paper, it is the designs based on the different types of paper that allow students to naturally involve the issues of materials into the consideration and discussion of design. This second section has laid the foundation for materials and form.
During the course of this section, in order to help the students understand the diversity of materials, the reasonable application forms of materials in design, and the relationship between materials and the designers’ internal memory, a female Italian artist, Maria Lai’s art pieces have been taken as examples for in-depth analysis. Maria Lai was born in a small village in Sardinia. Sardinian tradition, especially women's weaving culture, inspired her to turn sewing behavior into an art. Lines- as both materials and metaphorical objects, remain the theme of her design, conveying the concepts of relationship, bond and closeness. As the artist herself said, ‘what does sewing mean? A needle enters and leaves something and leaves a line: a track connecting position and intention.’
The materials in her works are the embodiment of memory and the symbol of seeking identity. Sewing meaningless text is to convey the metaphorical expression of relationship. The involvement of materials makes the designs break through the limitation of ‘only seeing but not touching’, upgrade the sense of touch to the front of vision, and open the design demand requiring both vision and touch.
Assignment: make a book delivering ‘memory’.
Requirements: there are no restrictions on selection of materials, but the use of materials must be closely related to the topic of ‘memory’.
students' designs
PU Xiangshan
LUO Qianyi
MA Yuqi
Ⅲ Space and Form
The third section ofFoundation of Form is about the relationship between space and form. The space discussed here is no longer limited to 2D space, but extends from the discussion of 2D space and form of painting to the guidance of 3D or even 4D space.
The course starts with George Russe, who invented a unique method to transform the relationship of painting into spatial relationship. He installed an equipment in abandoned buildings that had attracted him for quite a long time - creating temporary, unique art pieces by transforming ‘impossible’ places in daily space into image space only visible in his photos. The course also gives examples of earth art and Malevich's geometric abstract art, as well as the impact of these art forms on Georges Russe: developing the plane photography art into a new comprehensive art form, breaking the single artistic boundary of photography and integrating photography, architecture, painting and other media into his design.
Therefore, students were suggested to relate the consideration on form issues mentioned in the previous two sections in the actual teaching building space to create a ‘new’ space, the integration of existing space and fictional space.
Assignment: co-work with classmates to design an art piece based on thinking about space and time, reality and dreams.
students' designs
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
