emograms x CQIFS, 2020
Collaboration with Chongqing IFS, Chongqing, China, 2020
The exhibition consists of two parts, an outdoor inflatable emogram installation and an indoor emogram installation which is a cafe too. Top of the indoor "emograms cafe" have a two faces emogram which spinning round and round. One face is a positive emogram (HAPPY) and the other one is a negative emogram (LONLEY). The work reminds us of the cycle of life. Bad things are always followed by good things. Afther the pandemic, the exhibition is trying to cheer people up, that's why we use the "Keep Smiling" title.
To overcome the language difficulties of the exhibition, I also made some illustrations that explain the meaning of the emograms.
Short story of the emograms:
The news provided the inspiration for this installation: In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries chose an emoji pictogram (Emoji is a Japanese word, the ‘e’ means picture + ‘moji’ means a letter / character.) as the word of the year. I found this very exciting: we started written communication using drawings and pictograms, and then we constantly simplified these to letters and characters. After the birth of mobile and computer communication we re-created drawings and pictograms from characters and letters and incorporated them into our daily lives. I put the lost words back into the emojis. That's how emograms were born.
Photos and video © CQIFS
