Introduction
Throughout this year, I have explored the social connections between individuals and groups, developing various materials to express the feelings I have experienced through my visual language. My work reflects my thoughts on unconscious group separations in urban life by constructing illusory geometric spaces and using clay models to symbolize generalized human figures.
My research began with the book The Qiang Between Han and Tibetan, which explores the complex cultural and social dynamics of the Qiang people, a small ethnic group situated between two dominant groups, the Han Chinese and Tibetans. This book provides a vivid account of the Qiang’s experiences navigating the pressures of modernization and cultural preservation.
The Qiang, characterized by their strong group identity, have historically adapted to changing natural and social environments. Today, they live in clustered villages where they maintain relationships with both neighboring groups. With the Han, they engage in economic and social exchanges that bring benefits like healthcare and education but also risk losing their language and traditions. With the Tibetans, they share cultural ties and respect Tibetan Buddhism while facing competition for resources and navigating religious differences.
This study has inspired my observations of group interactions, highlighting themes of cooperation, conflict, and the delicate balance between internal cohesion and external influence. The Qiang’s strategies of cultural preservation and selective integration offer a lens through which to understand the dynamics of identity and solidarity in a multicultural context.
JR’s Inside Out project is a global art initiative centered around large-scale photographic portraits, aiming to highlight social issues and celebrate cultural diversity by bringing faces of ordinary people—especially those who are often overlooked or marginalized—into the public eye.
Emphasizing Humanity and Group Diversity
JR’s approach transforms ordinary individuals into “public figures,” displaying their faces in large scale and allowing them to silently communicate their identities and stories. The purpose is to emphasize the presence and uniqueness of each person and to encourage viewers to recognize and respect the dignity, voice, and experiences of diverse groups.
I believe that in JR’s project, his intent is clear and strong. To me, by initially inviting communities worldwide to upload photos, he is, in a way, encouraging the formation of a temporary, short-lived alliance within each community. People within each community who are willing to participate come together to form a temporary social group, as if the photos he collects compress different communities into compact spheres of information. Then, he projects these spheres to a broader public, making visible what was an unconscious collective awareness, putting it on display under a spotlight.
In essence, I feel that his approach is a detached analysis of social structures. However, by inviting collective participation in the creation process, he makes the project engaging and friendly. He starts from an individual level with a certain respect for each person and gradually builds up towards broader social significance. This kind of participation makes him less of a detached and more approachable. Instead of presenting a finished piece to enlighten the audience directly, his process itself becomes a warm, accessible, and thought-provoking work that resonates with the public and prompts deeper reflection.
As I pondered how to make the audience more immersed in this exhibition, I considered the issue of engagement. JR’s work feels more like a diverse fusion of performance art, which deepened my thinking on this matter. I started to wonder if, compared to interactive art forms that allow for lively conversation, audiences might be less interested and engaged with more two-dimensional narratives. Does directly presenting the outcome of the work to the audience reduce opportunities for deeper communication with people?
Breaking Down Separation and Barriers
By placing these faces in public spaces, JR aims to break down the distance between viewers and the artwork, forcing people to confront one another. Especially in places where social isolation and group differences are pronounced, this display helps “de-stigmatize” the unknown, creating emotional connections among people.
Social Critique and Collective Consciousness
Each participating community can choose a theme they wish to highlight, with many focusing on social issues such as racial equality, immigrant challenges, and cultural diversity. Different communities use their group portraits to raise awareness of social issues, sparking broader discussions and a collective consciousness.
JR’s Inside Out Project showcases the individual presence of ordinary people in a grand public space, bringing their faces into the public eye to provoke thought about community, identity, and social boundaries. By creating “visual collisions” in public spaces, JR prompts diverse groups to face each other, challenging the established notions of “group separation” and “social alienation.” This art form is not merely a visual impact but also a profound critique and reflection on social divides. This perspective greatly aids my own exploration of themes of social isolation and division, offering a warmer, alternative viewpoint on these societal issues.
In first section of my research, I hadn’t realized the strong sense of loneliness embedded in my work. I always thought that these small group portraits I created were lively and represented a kind of general crowd scene. However, after receiving feedback from a few exhibitions, I noticed that people frequently mentioned sensing this particular emotion in my work.
I believe this was not an emotion or resonance I intentionally wanted to impose in my work. Perhaps my personal feelings about the theme of social division affected the objectivity of this narrative. So, I started to examine and uncover the roots of my emotions: why hadn’t I previously acknowledged or realized this sense of loneliness?
Inner Conflict and Balance
In Karen Horney’s book Our Inner Conflicts, I read that when people experience a clash between two behavioral tendencies, they often choose to give up or relinquish something in order to reach an inner balance and gain a sense of security and stability in their personality. Karen suggests that individuals generally seek to satisfy two main drives: fulfillment and safety. Safety functions as an “avoidance” drive, primarily to relieve anxiety.
When I set the goals for this project and conducted my research, my aim was to explain and illustrate the mechanisms of social group division and its negative effects, such as social isolation and group conflicts, through artistic expression. My intention was to visualize and bring these hidden details and harms to the surface, to present them for people to contemplate and resonate with in a shared group awareness. Subconsciously, I saw myself as merely a conveyor, simply visualizing this process, creating from an objective perspective rather than as part of the group.
As a result, I overlooked the emotions drawn from my own perceptions influenced by the group dynamic, which unconsciously infused themselves into the work. This was a form of avoidance, a kind of self-protection. “If I were part of these groups, I would be influenced by the collective unconscious of a large group, making it impossible for me to tell the group’s story objectively.” My understanding clashed with the unreasonable parts of the external world I perceived. This inner conflict led me to disregard my own position within the work, making me believe I was conveying it objectively. Hence, my previous idea that “I am not part of the group I am discussing” was actually narrow-minded and nearly incorrect. My self-reflection is mapped in each clay model I made; each portrait could be a reflection of myself. Especially in those few small prints featuring just one figure, a part of me is greatly reflected in the person, curled up with their head down, reluctant to look up and face reality.
Lifting my gaze from the microcosm of myself to the larger public view, can things like “war,” “racial opposition,” “gender opposition,” and “division among people” be seen as the actions of a large collective striving for balance when confronting their own inner conflicts?
About figures
The main reason I chose this image as the largest piece in the entire print series is that I wanted to use the face-to-face interaction between the figures and the audience to facilitate communication. Additionally, some figures in this image are sitting at the edges, looking outward. This represents a part of the group that yearns to break away, hovering at the periphery, yet temporarily bound by the common interests or relationships within the group.
I don’t want to have clear figures on my characters. As the book, The Crowds, within a group, people inside do not have an obvious face or personality, their movements have been influenced deeply by the whole. Following the fluency, the tendency of what mainly members do.
In its ordinary sense the word ‘crowd’ means a gathering of individuals of whatever nationality, profession, or sex, and whatever be the chances that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view the expression ‘crowd’ assumes quite a different signification. Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the person in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organised crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.–The Crowd
The sense of ‘on stage’
My research is about the invisible boundaries and isolation between social interactions. I intent to show those neglected emotions and details directly to audiences, making invisible things on stage and lights on them. The stage is not only a setting but also a place of security and observation.
In each of my prints, the figures are either standing or seated on a certain plane, which serves as the base to create a contained space. These spaces are typically rendered in shades of gray, with no concrete imagery, only gradients of light and dark.
Beyond this space, I meticulously wipe the surrounding area clean, leaving it pure white and completely empty.This immaculate outer space, both in literal and metaphorical terms, represents a sense of “emptiness” and “detachment,” distancing the inner space from reality and conveying a conceptual void—a sense of groundlessness.
In terms of process, creating the image in the center of the plate makes the surrounding plate seem almost wasted, as this area remains untouched by any image exposure and, therefore, doesn’t print any color. However, it is precisely because the edges of my work lack color that the plate’s border marks, left during the printing process, stand out, thereby achieving my central theme: revealing the invisible boundaries.
About the Tone of My Work
When I realized how evident the sense of loneliness in my work was, I thought back to the artists I had chosen as references in the previous unit. Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, and Seurat all seem to convey their own sense of loneliness within their paintings. I sensed a certain commonality among them, and after further research, I discovered that they are all classified as existentialist artists.which often depicts human figures in state of isolation and loneliness, reflecting the painful inner turmoil of life.
While this feels somewhat familiar when compared to my own works, but in further research, I found their works especially emotionless figures are mainly telling about how people’s struggling in their own life and feeling to the world, highlighting alienation and search for meaning in a absurd world.
However, what I aim to express is not only individual situations, but more about using those figureless clay dolls to stand one kind of social distance, a depersonalisation that comes with group isolation, putting the awkwardness of human interaction on stage. I critique isolation as a result of society constructs, that makes my work in line with social commentary and contemporary realism than existentialism. Although they are related to existentialism in the formal and emotional similarities, but I still intent to explore other aspects of human experience, such as hows invisible boundaries people created to make us isolated, and how undertring social problems evoke emotions in us all.
Images
Inside Out, Times Square, The floor and the billboard, New York, JR, 2013
https://www.jr-art.net/projects/inside-out-times-square (Accessed: 11 November 2024)
Liuyi Huang, Crowds,us, Etching on Photo-polymer 79cm x 107cm (2024)
Liuyi Huang, Crowds,us 3, Etching on Photo-polymer 38cm x 28cm (2024)
Liuyi Huang, Crowds,us 4, Etching on Photo-polymer 57cm x 76cm (2024)
Liuyi Huang, Crowds,us 2, Etching on Photo-polymer 38cm x 28cm (2024)
References
Between is not being – François Jullien, 2022 – sage journals. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/02632764221111324 (Accessed: 12 November 2024).
Bon, L.G. (2002) The crowd: A study of the popular mind. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Horney, K. (1992) Our inner conflicts Karne Horney.
The largest Global Participatory Art Project Inside Out Project. Available at: https://www.insideoutproject.net/en/about (Accessed: 11 November 2024).
Non-place Oxford Reference. Available at: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100237780 (Accessed: 11 November 2024).
Wang,Mingke (2022) Qiang zai Han Zang Zhi Jian: Chuan Xi Qiang zu de Li Shi Ren Lei Xue Yan Jiu. Shanghai: Shang hai ren min chu ban she.
About the Author
Liuyi Huang is an artist based in London and Shanghai, working in printmaking and illustration. Her main focus in her work is exploring the division and isolation of social groups, often expressed through etching prints.
Liuyi completed an MA in Fine Art Printmaking at UAL Camberwell in December 2024.
Personal Website: https://cioran17.wixsite.com/liuyi-huang
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paskiwuna/