Fragments with Year-Round Colors: Public Art Project
“Fragments with Year-Round Colors” includes four different images that were selected as a winning design for a public art project undertaken by the City of West Lafayette’s public art program in 2021. The project looked for artistic concepts and designs for light pole banners in the Sagamore TIF District to promote and celebrate the diverse community, achievements, growth, and change.
I created four different images to suggest the seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each banner is based on my watercolor painting, “Homage to Bojagi”. I digitally modified the colors of the painting, so each banner design has a particular color scheme that suggests the seasons. Each color scheme was inspired by the photographs I have taken of my surroundings in West Lafayette. Throughout the year, I photograph local scenes and use them as references for my landscape paintings. So, the photos I selected for this project contain seasonal colors that inspired my works.
I cropped the watercolor painting to fit the size of the banner, so each banner displays a distinct part of the painting. Yet together the four different banners create compositional unity due to the foundational image.
The painting is a collage that is made out of paper scraps that I painted with watercolors. The process of the collage is just like quilting with fabric scraps. I painted the papers, then cut them up and made them into shapes, which I then arranged side by side and placed next to each other. The fragments are intermingled as an abstract representation of my surrounding landscape. The puzzle-like shapes in the painting suggest that all people in the community can participate on their own terms regardless of their cultural background, just as the fragments are gathered and eventually make a successful whole regardless of their shape.
I approached to the project with this concept since I believe that we can build a community where diverse people coexist in peace by enjoying our common assets such as nature. Nature is something we all enjoy and cherish. West Lafayette has four distinct seasons showcasing a variety of striking colors. I came up with the idea of the four seasons as my theme for the light pole banner project to celebrate the beautiful year-round environment in the city.