GRAPHIC & MEDIA DESIGN SHOWCASE 2024 STUDENTS

Zijie Zhang

Hi! I’m Zijie Zhang, a recent graduate of UAL London College of Communication. During my undergraduate period, I experienced and learned traditional graphic design, such as advertising posters, font design, and brand image. I was also encouraged to break through my previous understanding of graphic design. Recently, I tried to use multiple media in graphic design to make up for the loss of emotion in the visualisation process. My designs often start from a particular social context and conducting research, hoping that the work can have a connection with social life and, at the same time, convey the meaning and concept that can cause profound reflection and resonance with the audience.

moc.361@1380eijizgnahz

Family Echoes

“Every Parent is an Artist, Every Child is a Work of Art”.
This design work is based on my upbringing and the relationship between the number of caregivers and child care. It is hoped that while seeing the context of this work, the audience can reflect on what love is and realise the consequences of the absence of father care caused by the division of gender functions in the organisational structure of the nuclear family. My research began with child psychology and paternalism. First, I found a phenomenon on online social platforms: netizens born in 2000 and grown up now make complaints to their parents. Then, after reflecting on my past experiences, I confirmed the problem by talking and digging through old photos. In the research process, I noticed the correlation between China’s former production team social model, the old extended family, and the similarity between it and the modern kin-social society. This led me to explore the impact of the number of caregivers in different modes on children’s growth experiences to find a suitable path.

Based on the diversity of information media collected and better emotional communication, I tried to combine books with other media. In the book, based on my experience growing up, I reveal the communication problems I encountered in the nuclear family because of a single caregiver through the timeline of events and the recall of related objects. On the other hand, I reference my childhood experience in which my parents based their experience of growing up as a production team and their educated experience that has been applied to me. This example illustrates the circular shackles of children’s education in the absence of communication between families. In China, most parents are involved in their children’s education for the first and last time. They will guess and worry, but ultimately, they will choose what they think is best. Such a one-off experience made the issue not well discussed and resolved. I focus on this theme in this work, hoping to allow the audience to reflect.

Who are you

Dissertation – Element 2
My installation art is inspired by the abstract speech language form of Baidu Post Bar, an Internet platform with similar features to meme graphs. In the paper, I mentioned the co-creation form of a meme graph, in which Internet users create memes combined with pictures and images according to real-time hot spots and spread them in a circle. In this case, images can help the audience to carry out divergent associations, while text content can help the audience to determine a general association range. The real-time hot spot can maximise the capture of the current understanding of hot spot propagation as the circle target.

By collecting regional discriminatory remarks on the Internet, I attract the audience and reflect on this problem through the language form of abstract words. In my paper, I spent a lot of space describing the dissemination process of meme graphs and used many professional words. However, Internet communication and memes are based on the broad masses, and I can’t hope everyone can understand art and these professional descriptions. So, I used a form that was familiar to them to detect the reflection problem. I hope this work can make the audience pay more attention to this widespread but often ignored problem around us. When we surf the Internet, we frequently want to vent our emotions and have fun. Everything has become the object of entertainment, but few people feel the ideas of others, Internet echo chambers, memes, and network conflict will be manifested in a form of embodiment in the work.