Final It's A Small World

The wallpaper on my phone sparked up the idea of tis one. The wallpaper is a ariel beach view, which makes you feel like having god's view. I decided to do something similar but using stuff from my kitchen. Since I love cooking, these subjects should also served as representational media of one face of mine. Things I've been used for this scene are mainly condiments, accompanied by some Aspirin pills, almonds, tongs, pasta boxes and pots. For the land base and road, I used leftover design class papers. The 90% of the image was constructed physically, so there aren't many things left for digital construction. There are a few touches which includes the "stop" sign on intersection, helicopter platform and the clouds. I also tried to creative a toy-like world by boost up saturation and adding tilt-shift effect. 

When I was building up ideas about this shot, I was inspired by some great artists like Tatsuya Tanaka who use mini figures and everyday stuff to create hundreds of scenes. While mine is created to represent a current cyber statue in mainland China: Almost all the network services are blocked by the government for better censorship.  At the front of the image, several people are mourning for the death of Instagram, which is the latest service blocked by the government. Behind it are another three well known services that has already been blocked for years. In the far end stands a huge red wall, which represent the system used for building "intranet" and blocking foreign services called "Great Fire Wall". Saturation is toned down and the contrast has been increased to enhance the sense of depressing. The relative size variances between human figures and the wall is created to show how hard and how inconvenient it is for ordinary Chinese folks to get over the wall and see the outside cyber world.
On the surface, it is ridiculous to see how people's freedom of fetching information are tremendously limited by such way. But politics is way complicated than anyone could imagine, which I bet is more complicated than adding salt. Having a strong censorship in mainland China kind of make sense in some ways especially when you are ruling a huge piece of land with over 1.3 billion people. Not having a strong control could result in problems we might ignore, especially at the moment that we are desperately in need of liberty. Liberty and control are relative terms, no one can ever enjoy the absolute liberty in any given condition.
For people like me who studies abroad and has the access to all the things we want, it is a truly precious time. When looking back to what is happening in my country, it's like looking in to a well from the outside world. I could do nothing for them besides stand at a highland and watch.