FINE ART PRINTMAKING
RELEVANT CONTEXTS
Market, camra, 2021
My theme is to attack the alienation of consumption context between people and things under the influence of consumerism. My practice is to observe and describe the influence of consumerism in our daily life from the perspective of consumers. I want to discuss the current situation of people in the consumer society and the relationship between people and things in the alienation of consumerism through the assumption of the future of consumerism. Jean Baudrillard pointed out in the consumer society (1996) that in the society where consumerism prevails, the status of people and goods has changed. People are no longer the main body guiding production, but adjust their lives with the rhythm of goods. People begin to establish social relations through consumption.
In the first part, I discussed the influence of consumerism on my life, hoping that the audience can get resonance from my consumption traces. In the second part, I use consumer portraits to express people's current consumption dilemma. In the second part, the movie fight club gives me a lot of inspiration. This is an anti consumerism movie. The protagonist suffers from schizophrenia because he can't stand the life in the consumption era, and pursues spiritual freedom with another personality. There are a lot of dialogues in the film, such as quilt theory. The sociologist Theodore Arnoldo also said a similar theory, he pointed out that the main purpose of design is to improve cost-effectiveness and forge differences. Good marketing will make the goods we buy look different from each other, but in fact they are the same, which is a kind of copy. Arnold and Horkheimer (1942) also pointed out that mass consumption is the same as fascism in some aspects. They both regard human beings as a series of numbers rather than individuals. People who grow up in a materialistic environment will eventually become like objects themselves.
In the 1990s, China's commerce was just on the rise. At the end of the 1990s, commerce really became popular, and ideas became more open. Consumerism began to penetrate into people's daily life in a real sense. The tide of consumerism is from south to north, and people can't adapt to it. In this carnival of rampant consumption, people gradually feel confused and nihilistic. This is a non confrontational sense of out of focus, a product of the contemporary consumer society, which caters to the state of psychological weightlessness in China's next step of economic growth( Jiang Jun, 2020)
In this case, people gradually lose the perception of time. People's life revolves around working hard to earn money, spending heartily, even our entertainment activities are in the presupposition of consumerism (Jiang Jun, 2020), so people fall into a vicious circle.
I hope the audience can re-examine the relationship between self and consumer society through my works, and think about how we should get rid of the material control of consumer society.