Portable Problems of Urbanization by @sharonqian #6 - 月旦评

Next to me are a set of grey leads wrapped in octagonal wooden sheathes. I draw one out and begin my outline of Van Gogh’s masterpiece on the walls of my professor’s studio. I remember as a child, I drew on the walls of our home, on my pillow, on my clothes. There was a red crumbly rock that served as a great chalk. Angered by the artistry, my parents subdued the vandal and shipped her off to boarding school😂.

Distant from our parents, my roommates and I told bedtime stories to each other nightly. We imagined ourselves as detectives, adventuring in Italy and France during the Renaissance. To materialize our fantasies, I started to sketch everyone’s ideas. In one nonsensical story, we climbed into David of Michelangelo’s ear and withdrew a delicate diorite key to a secret bookshelf that connected us to the basement of a Catholic church in Florence. I sketched the face of David each night to learn the way he looked when light hit his face at different angles, his various gradations of color, and where to darken to show his facial muscles and curly hair and solemn expression. I showed these sketches to aid our bedtime stories.

I left boarding school in Nanjing for high school in Charlotte, NC. When I went back to Nanjing in the summer, I noticed the sky was not the celestial blue I remembered and people wore masks to filter PM 2.5 particles. The population had increased, more factories had been built, and more cars choked the streets. Clean air had become a luxury. Disappointed by government inactivity, I began to express myself the best way I could: I picked up my brushes, my swords to battle the downsides of urbanization.

I wanted to create something public to remind people of the urgency of acting environmentally friendly. I decided to make portable art on paper and tote bags. On a brown paper bag, I painted workers plastering white—symbolizing clean air—onto dusty smoke from pencil-sketched factories.

Painting Away the Pollution

On a tote, I drew a balance with gold coins on one side and a sunlit forest on the other. Whereas the gold of capitalism had the background of an arid desert, the golden sunshine is dispersed in a sustainable, exuberant forest.

The Balance

Sharon and her The Balance painting

My artwork grew to be more abstract and the takeaways more implicit. I painted a red temple by a lake, its reflection a factory leaking inky smoke. The mountains in the background are black and white, an allusion to traditional Chinese painting but in our modern context, an implication that they’re obscured by smog and haze.

I actually painted the following painting on a Harris Teeter recyclable grocery bag

Temple, Lake and Pollution
50% progress

100% progress

My friends carried around the bags before I donated them to my Nanjing school. The bags were environmentally friendly but were an unsustainable canvas. The more they were used, the more the paintings on them wore down too—an apt analogy for the resources we consume and their environmental burden. Though art has become a tool for my activism, I’ve always thought of my art as a gift to others. In return, art has brought me friendship, community, and a sense of purpose❤️.

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今天Sharon给大家讲个睡前小故事吧。这个故事呢，是关于Sharon小时候与画画结下不解之缘的故事。

Sharon在6岁不到就 （因为在家里墙上乱画） 而被爸妈（狠心）踢进了南京某知名重点住宿小学。

在那里，一间宿舍有六个人。我们每天晚上的娱乐活动就是轮流讲故事，所以Sharon有一天一拍脑袋，何不用画笔来记下大家的想法呢。。于是乎，就开始学习素描啦。

下面重点来了！在2015年左右（这时已经学了8年画画啦），中国出现了很严重的雾霾，而这样的现象却迟迟没有缓解，作为一名环保主义者，Sharon决定以“城市化带来的问题”为主题创作一个美术集。而又因为初衷是将这种对环境的重视传播下去，Sharon决定在牛皮纸袋和手提袋上进行创作。这样一来便可以有更多的人看到这些反乌托邦风格的画作从而重视空气水质量并思考是否在极快发展的社会里迷失了最初的自己🎻。

上面这几幅画是Sharon从自己作品集里选出的几个例子，希望大家能跟随Sharon的画笔一起关注身边的环境🤓🤓。

作者注：此原创文章由马上要考AP Exam，却忙里偷闲码文章的Sharon献上 :)