Author: Kaliy Tsang

This exhibit is presented by Ka Yee Tsang. Tk is the abbreviation of her name Tsang, Ka Yee. She was born and raised in Hong Kong, then moved to New York where she now lives and studies. She inspired from Tom Phillips, in his A Humument book to create composition that draws and painting into the book pages, that combined the language and art of the vision. The concept of the Humument artwork, is creating the shapes, founding a text of the pages that have the different meaning of the original.

After understanding of the concept, Tk try to create the first humument design, she combined the skill of learning from the COMD 1100’s project. She used the line, repetition, variety, pattern and texture of her first design, which called “Flower” of the Enrique’s Journey book. In this work, TK wanted to create a simple idea that represents the Flower pattern. Set up the pattern like the painting book called ”Secret Garden”. This beautiful and interactive coloring book features delicate and highly detailed pen-and-ink illustrations. When she got the idea from the secret garden, she was using the black and white composition, then lay out the curvy figure, randomized draw though the page. To create the first humument page, she used ink brush pen and sharpie on paper. She was using a legato pattern to create the flower pattern. Legato mean in a manner that is smooth and flowing, I learned the concept to lay out the smooth and flowing line that creates the pattern look like the flower and bloom in the page.

Using these concepts, Tk created the second humument page of her book, which called “Shackles” the idea of this page was intended by the artist to represent the idea of imagination. She used the markers drew the sun in the middle, and putted the chain to connect the sun. Everyone know that sun surface temperature of approximately 5,505 °C / 9,941 °F, Nothing can be closest to the Sun. In this second design, Tk putted the chain to connect the sun, that was her imagination of the page. Even though she didn’t used any concept of this pages, she tried to create something impossible but simple design of her artwork. At this page, she just used color markers and color pencils to create, because she thought the color markers will be more useful of drawing the sun in the middle without using the inking brush pens. The color was the perfect way to represent more detail of the Sun like she used the yellow and orange color markers. Then the chain used the color pencils to create it, who used the green color on the chain that has the contrast between the yellow, orange and the green color.

At Tk’s humument artwork, the last piece of her design called “Don’t You Love Me?”, the idea came from the page who was highlight the text to show the main idea of the character’s feeling. Drawing this page, the concept is selected text to go though the character’s feeling, his mad, sadness and helpless of found his mother. Tk was using the text, “Don’t you love me?” “No one love me” that represents the feeling from the page, then drew the broken heart on the bottom to mention the idea. At the last text of the page, which was “Please bury me.” The sentence raised the character’s feeling of everything that can’t change at the reality. Tk used inking brush pens to cover the word that she didn’t want to show it, and lay out the main sentence to represent the main idea of the feeling. She also cut out some page to paste near the broken heart, when people opened the page, “the boy behind” those words will appear in front of you. Those words was deeply increase the sadness feeling of the this design. All the humument artwork was convey the message who try to contain the idea of her design, even though the story or the characters have their own plot, meaning and story.