Talking about the climate crisis, I have to think of the hazy weather in Beijing. Beijing’s bad weather is difficult to get fixed, even though it is our capital city. My friend who works in Beijing told me: every day for a few years I got up and saw the sky like this. It’s really scary that the climate crisis turns out to be real in our daily lives. Fortunately, I didn’t experience this kind of bad weather when I visited Beijing. But because we didn’t experience it, can we ignore it? Then I realised that the climate crisis needs to be brought to our attention and that we should not wait until the planet’s living environment is irreversible.
And then I did some reach on climate crisis,then I noticed
Seas are rising and oceans are acidifying.
Glaciers are melting and corals are bleaching.
Droughts are spreading and wildfires are burning.
Deserts are expanding and access to water is dwindling.
Heatwaves are scorching and natural disasters are multiplying.
Storms everywhere are more intense. More frequent. More deadly.
António Guterres said in 2019 Climate Action Summit:
we fool ourselves if we think we can fool nature.
Because nature always strikes back.
It was only at this point that I decided to make a art work that would attract to the public and draw attention to the climate crisis.
And then I will introduce What inspires me,
The first picture was from my friend which show me the Beijing Haze’s picture. This work talk about the human return to the earth,like the first man landed on the moon. He told me :If the day comes when the Earth is no longer fit for living, then humans will want to try to land on it, just as they do today on other planets.
The second one is Scrappy punk style CG painting,I’ve seen a lot of references to this style In the end I think this style fits very well in the climate crisis .
The last one is by another artist friend of mine, this one is titled ‘In Search of’ because of the extinction of animals due to climate change, and he has used CG character models to realise this theme. This gave me an idea of how to use models to express the theme of the climate crisis, and by now I had the inspiration in my head.
This is my part of Sketchbook,included my thought, the story background, I think It is necessery for a work to have the background. Many years from now the earth will no longer be able to breathe freely due to high levels of pollution and extreme weather, and humans will be dependent on machines to survive. My initial idea was a young girl alive in a machine body with a computer attached to her head and covered in catheters, but I later modified the composition to highlight the character of the girl.
I found some reference images on the internet made by other artists, as well as a few paintings for pose reference, and a large number of reference images of the human body that I had prepared myself flat. For the mechanical equipment on the girl, I also found a lot of references and made a storyboard I used PureRef for the storyboard, a free little software that works very well. Once I was well prepared, I started sculpting the model in Z-brush. I wasn’t going to map and light it because of lack of time, but I thought I would eventually use the other time to complete the mapping and rendering.
Why I choose add this to my work or why my work look like this,I wanted to express the playfulness and beauty of a young girl, which in my work represents beauty and vitality, Many classical artists liked to use the maiden as a representation of beauty. And so do I. And this is in contrast to the oxygen masks, the catheters, the cold machinery, the imprisoned bodies. The computer connected to the girl is used to detect vital data. But these beauties, to which mankind look for, will no longer exist as the climate crisis.
I had face some problem during this work.
I believe that technical problems are relatively easy to solve in the process of model making, and finding a good method can improve the efficiency of model making, but the most important thing is creativity and knowledge of human anatomy. Because I had neglected the changes of the human body in different postures when I did the human anatomy exercises before, I spent a lot of time to supplement my anatomical knowledge during the process of making the model, and I still need to continue to work hard in learning human anatomy in the future.