Elly Poh
My inspiration for this piece of work was The Pleasure of Being, Crying, Dying and Eating by the Thai artist Montien Boonma. The piece represents the cycle of life and death and everything in between. The piece was made in 1993 and reconstructed in 2015. Boonma explores physical objects that aren’t commonly used in art pieces such as chopsticks, bowls, bones and napkins. The use of these objects that are incorporated with everyday life combined with the unique composition and meaning of this piece brings a new distinctive aspect into consideration.
For my piece, I stayed consistent with the colours used in Boonma’s piece such as red and a cream colour, but I played with alternating the shades and tones and adding hints of contrasting colours such as tones of blue. The background of my painting resembles flesh and the physical being of life, it is also in lighter shades as not to take away the main composition but to compliment it. The diagonal line of squares in different shades symbolizes the colours of organs and the material body of being and the symbol that intertwines with it represents the soul and mind and the mentality of being. Together this symbolises the substantial existence of life and its cycles. The asterisks that have been printed along this piece when translated into ASCII code is 42 and this is translated into the meaning of everything and life itself, it refers to the cycles of life and death and the perpetual continuance of it.
I used the numbers 6 and 2 as in angle numbers the number 62 depict the challenges and struggles of life and how its moods you as an individual which relates to the title of Boonma’s piece, 206 is also the number of bones in your body and Boonma’s piece includes physical bones and I wanted to find a way to incorporate the idea of bones without using it as a material. There is also a koi fish integrated into the number 2 as 2 koi fish represent the duality of life and the balance of opposing life forces and again relating back to the idea of cycles. How the composition was put together was to make sure there was an equal balance of negative and positive space and that the piece was abstract and not too symmetrical to ensure the aesthetic aspects of the piece and the colours blend together nicely to resemble a mixture of tones in the piece.