Against the pale-pink backdrop of blooming Sakura trees, Wanlin Art Museum witnessed opening of the First Student Production Exhibition held by the School of Urban Design of WHU. The exhibition covers various categories of production, including pottery and lacquerware, graphic and cubic designs, oil and digital paintings, watercolours, drawings, models and photographic works. Students from the School of Urban Design convey their own inner voices in multiple ways.
A piece of pottery at the exhibition
Freshmen’s admission letters and graduates’ t-shirts lie in showcases beside the entrance of the museum. These works represent the start and end points of each WHUer’s campus life journey.
Wandering around the first floor of the museum, two exquisite wooden models are catching eyes. They are the models of two famous temples of Wuhan city, named Baotong Temple and Gude Temple. Normally, it takes five or more students nearly a month to co-design such models.
Details of the architecture model
Near the temple models is a wooden table with a chair. This set of elaborate productions is completely handmade and connected by a tenon and mortise (sunmao) structure. It may seem ordinary, but what sets it apart is that there were independently designed and made by Wen Xinya, a junior student majoring in production design. Under the guidance of her instructor and after painstaking research, self-study and planning, she discovered the rationale behind the relevant design craftsmanship and completed her design. The whole process has cultivated her ability to find, analyse and solve problems.
Blue and white porcelain
What appeals to a multitude of visitors on the basement floor is a series of digital paintings, one of which was inspired by the Chinese sci-fi movie, The Wandering Earth. It combines the images of the protagonist Liu Qi with his father Liu Peiqiang, Earth with Jupiter, reality with fantasy, as well as past with future. The painter Wu Yuze, a junior student from the School of Urban Design, says that instead of designing the painting intentionally, it merely expresses his own understanding and feeling of the film. Karina, a Kazakh student in WHU, regards this work as her favourite. She finds it so impressive that she wants to come to Wanlin Art Museum more frequently to appreciate art works.
The digital painting The Wandering Earth
Students from the School of Urban Design are passionate about their major. They immerse themselves in their designs for most of their spare time. It requires patience and perseverance to turn their homework into pieces of art. How marvellous it is that their work can be exhibited in the museum of WHU when they are still just students of the university. Just as the theme of this exhibition she yi goes, design reflects the students’ inner voice. In Chinese, she means design, while the Chinese character yi is composed of the Chinese characters yin (voice) and xin (heart), which means the voice from the heart: through their works, they express their own inner voice, just as the theme suggests.
“Different from previous exhibitions, this student production exhibition is initiated and organized by students themselves. I only help them select pieces and offer advice on arranging the exhibition. They deserve such a platform to show their talents”, said the curator Wen Qingwu, Professor of the School of Urban Design of WHU, who thinks very highly of the exhibition.
Photo by Karina Syrym
Edited by Jiang Chiheng, Wei Junyi, Shi Weiya & Hu Sijia
