To change a theme of a book by using the text from the original book is not as difficult as it sound. This exhibit is presented by Xingfu, Ye. Ye was born and raise up in Zhejiang, China. Then he moved to New York where now he live. Ye is a student of New York City College of Technology whose major is graphic design. He get inspired by a British artist Tom Phillips’ recreation “The Humument”.
“The Humument” was first publish in 1970, it was a recreation of W H Mallock’s Novel “A Human Document”, and the name “The Humument” was come from the original novel name. Tom Phillips took out “an” from the word human, and “Doc” from document, then he put two words together become Humument. The purpose of this is to recreate a different theme and story of a book to let reader have a different experience of reading the original book and recreated version of the book.
Alice Taylor’s novel House of Memories is a story of resilience in the face of family tragedy. Ye have recreates few pages of House of Memories with different theme, his favorite three pages are “Great Position”, “Death and life”, and “Twisted space”. In first page, Ye try to convey a great position, so he used Ruler, Pigma Micron 05, and PITT artist Big brush to draw lines and solid bridges to support the center. The idea was come from the text where he found the words “Great position”. He is trying to explain that how could a position stand out, a great position is where the surrounds are supporting one area to make it a great position. For this page, if views did not see the word great position, they might be confuse and not understanding about this page. In the second page, life and death, Ye also used Ruler, Pigma Micron 05, and PITT artist Big brush to drew circles and line taps, half of which were filled in with black ink and the other half left blank. The idea was came from the text, the words “dead,” and “live”. Ye is trying to express that live and death are so close. The lines was drawn twisted, because he wants to show that life is difficult so is death. Views might confuse about the circles, Ye said he drew circles was trying to represent spirit, but he did not write in the description, because he think the circles could also represent as events that makes how the life is going to be, different person has different views. In the third page, Ye drew a snake goes in circle like a sea shield also with Ruler, Pigma Micron 05, and PITT artist Big brush, this is trying to convey a Twisted space. Ye said this is how he thinks a twisted space look like, a twisted space in his mind is like a space that everything is twisted and has no end. In this page, views might think that this drawing look like a portal, Ye also had a thought about that, however he thinks inside of the portal there must be another space, and that space is just like what he have described.
Understand Tom Phillips’ Humument project, Ye used with all skills and techniques from Graphic design principle 1100 and English 1101 class to create this humument book.
Ye’s recreations give readers a different point of view of the original novel. From a resilience in the face of family tragedy story to a imagery of fantasy story. Each page contains a small message about the new theme of the story.
