Annika Wen, Johnny Zhou
The concept of “TEARS” originates from the cliche of “life is like a play and people always act with their masks on”. We have witnessed countless examples of how people could not stand the pressure of wearing the “mask” or the consequence of breaking their mask, resulting in extreme conduct. No matter how emotionally stable Sand impervious you may seem on the surface from the mask you wear, your true emotions are always bubbling under the dissimulation of false social status, and there is no way you can run away from it. The accumulation of real feelings and the dissonance revealed through the mask is a flood about to break the levee, eventually engulf, encircle, and destroy everything he establishes through the mask.
We used liquid-like textures integrating black, white, grey, and blue clay to resemble the miscoloring society, which is shaped through the perspective of the masked self. The glittering silver powder, paper-made clothes, and the medieval-noble-styled petal-shaped stand-up collar symbolize the social status, wealth, power, and other seemingly shining things established through the mask. But as mentioned before, the dissonance between true and false emotions will eventually break down the line between truth and hypocrisy of people. So we use blue, yellow, and red to separately represent different kinds of emotions. The eye-pattern brooch and the LED strip symbolize the cumulative process of imbalance between true and false emotions. The burst of it, the emotional dissonance, instead of in the form of tears, it’s much more intensive and is amplified in the way of wrapping around your body like a blood vessel, eventually gushing out, dyeing all the stuff, and all hypocrisy will back to the truest self.
Moodboard
Material Choice
Mask: Our motivation for using clay is firstly from a practical point of view, its lighter mass ensures the safety of being attached to the mask, and secondly it mimics the texture of human skin in higher quality, especially when it is dry it cracks a little bit where it is not covered with gloss oil, so as to herald all the emotional events to come.
The liquid-like texture is a symbolization of the mixture of flowing emotions, whether true or not, that eventually will consume you.
Clothes: Paper is fragile and easy to knead and shape, and we used it as a material for clothing because we wanted to present the fragility and perishable quality of something built through a false mask.
Texture experiments 🌊
The dyeing experiment shows that the mixture of white fabric and the low-concentration colored pigments effect is that ideal, causing a weird jumble of colors. So we use paper and highly-concentrated pigments instead.
Dyeing experiments
The colors were mixed to symbolize the fusion of different emotions, but it was found that the effect was below our expectation, where the gradient and transition between regions appeared very confusing. So we switched to the gray scale, representing the intensity of the emotion from 0 to 1, instead of using multiple emotions.
Applying shine oil
The glittering silver powder symbolizes social status, wealth, power, and other seemingly shining things established through the mask.
Eyes
We use wires to shape a red-phoenix-style eye, which is embedded with LED strips to stand for the accumulation process of the imbalance between your true emotion and the false one you are showing through the disguise of the mask.
Lilypad