Zitong Chen

I grew up in a city in Southeast China. When I was very young, I learned painting and piano, which inspired my potential in art and design. I then studied visual communication design in Communication University of China.

During my studies at the RCA, I have been discovering and learning new things. I have explored fonts, comics, installations, images, and relationships between people. I aim to convey ideas.

In 2017, I took part in a workshop course on art and flexible electronic media, and worked with a postdoctoral student from MIT on the project of stick circuits. This experience enriched my opinions and opened my mind to the diversity of design, which can include any materials you can imagine.

In 2018, I worked as an intern in a design institute in Beijing and engaged in graphic design and video post-production in the advertising department. This experience helped me learn knowledge that one doesn’t usually learn in school, such as how to best communicate with people and how to solve problems that arise in my work.

In 2019, my graduation project "Sense of ceremony" was collected by the China Advertising Museum.

My works include illustration, video, modeling and so on. This year, the virus has kept people at a distance. People spent most of their time indoors, and ‘working from home’ has a lot of restrictions.

In these circumstances, the house is as important to people as the picture frame is to painting. Recently, an old house in my family is about to be demolished. It's a house that I lived in for more than ten years in my childhood. This old house is inextricably intertwined with my childhood life. In my heart, this reinforced concrete building space is not only a place to live, but also endowed with memories. Because of its direct relationship with my childhood, it was easier to find happiness back then. Every person’s childhood has its own unique form. Before the age of three or four most memories can't be recalled. Memory is fuzzy and modifiable, like a Wikipedia page. Fragments of childhood may move over time and may be forgotten. This has inspired me to take my childhood, and old houses, as sites to save.

2 — This is a room that I've lived in for ten years.

3 — My brain drives the idea of childhood memory and creates this emotional connection. It inspired me to try to preserve those childhood memories. When I visited the old house on the spot and sorted out the things in the old house, I found many things that could bring me childhood memories.

4 — And then I thought, how can I keep these memories and stories? I did a little experiment.I put the things collected from the old house into the vacuum compression bags for vacuumizing, and then take photos of each single vacuum compression bag. I hope to preserve those fading childhood memories by keeping them fresh. These are the visual effects I get.

5 — And I also try to preserve the living space of my childhood through my works. Then I thought maybe I could make a copy of it to save my childhood space. I want to turn reality into imaginary reality, reconstruct my childhood memory, preserve my previous life space, and reproduce the physical space of my past childhood life.

7 — These are the local images after modeling.

8 — This is a view of the whole room. I set the time for the most impressive moment of my childhood, the moment when my grandmother and I were in the room.

9 — In my opinion, the content of childhood emotion and memory is relatively personal, everyone will have different feelings. I also did a small project about childhood memories. I explored how I and others feel about childhood memories differently. Through surveys, I selected 16 things they most wanted to do in their childhood. Then I use illustrations to reflect these moments.

10 — I printed the illustrations on the thick Chevy board, which showed a special visual effect.

11 — I also printed the illustrations on the thick acrylic board. I piled it up like a thick book,because I think books are a good medium for preservation.Books can serve as a record keeping function. It also conveys the idea that I want to preserve memory fragment.

12 — In my previous exploration, I found that Although what I keep is the memory that I like in my heart and think it is perfect, my copy is not perfect. I can't copy it 100%. So I realized that memory is not complete, memory is happy and painful, memory will be forgotten. Everyone's memory has this characteristic. So I tried to explore different memories. This includes the perfect memory, the imperfect memory, and the incomplete part.

13 — I made more than a dozen transparent glass jars with 3D models, and I plan to keep my memory in the jars. I used jars to share my childhood memories. I treated the surface of the jar. I put perfect memories in transparent jars, imperfect memories in transparent jars with cracks I use this cracked jar full of clouds and fog to express forgotten bad memories..

14 — The Little doll in the picture represents myself.Every jar has memories of my childhood, and every jar has a story.

15 — I think when we talk about objects in real life, it may be very complicated, but when we talk about objects in childhood, all the memories may be very simple. So I try to create a visual style, a cartoon visual style. Cartoon means childhood, just like a child. So I made all the elements more cartoon and unified. It is no longer a combination of reality and cartoon, but a unified style, which makes complexity simple. I think it's more about adults' real memory of children.

26 — This is a collection of all the jars.

27 — Then I model a tree, a memory tree. I want to hang my memory jar on the tree. In my opinion, there is such a tree in everyone's heart.A tree that preserves our own memories.

28 — This is the effect of hanging the jar. The fresh knowledge and emotion brought by childhood is the basis of people's understanding of the world and self cognition.

29 — With the accumulation of years, these cognition and emotion become the cornerstone of a people's knowledge system and emotional system. And unconsciously affect the cognition and emotion of later generations, just as the ancient fuzzy cognition and thought of human still affect the life and thought of modern people.

30 — Everyone thinks about what they want. They either want to go back to a certain moment in the past, or want to keep something from the past, or feel that they have lost something in the future, or feel that they have lost something. We are all a collection of memories and feelings. The memories and emotions that accompany us all our lives need to be cherished.

The theme of my graduation project is childhood memory. We need to choose a site for exploration in the site class this semester. The site I chose was the house I lived in as a child. The inspiration comes from the recent demolition of an old house in my family, which I lived in for more than ten years in my childhood...