May 2024 – 000

Week 01

My plan for unit3 is divided into two perspectives about the topic of “fujian immigration”. 1. media perspective 2. their story

so, to document their story, I asked my friend if I can work with them. At first, the boos was not agreed, she is very cautious. And my friend lied to her that I’m studying at KCL(idk why can’t say I’m an art student…) and I’m studying media so I can post her restaurant on Chinese social media.

I took some pics there and made some notes.

notes and dialogue with them

Diary

Feedback:

do they have community? can I help them to build one?
how can I benefit them?
document more

week 02

I was surprised by the questions they raised in the feedback. They suggested that community is not a good thing for them because it makes them feel very insecure and doubts the purpose of establishing this community.

Until now I realised how arrogant I am.

I used to think that such records were very simple, just to take some photos of them and then add some life stories they wanted to tell, just like the countless artwork I saw.

I overlooked that every group is different, and for Fujian immigrants, telling their stories is not a good thing and can even put them in danger. And what is called building community, they don’t need community and they don’t need art.

So I turned the narrative to myself, by reassembling my diary, to record everything I saw as an observer.

experiment 01: an online archive

the archive shows how media present the image of fujian immigrants, and when you click on each image, it shows the media report alongside my observation diary.

feedback:

too complicated for people who have no idea about fujian immigrants
why online archive? who is your audience?
try semi fictional narrative

week 03

as showing my diary, even in semi fictional style, there is no way to avoid showing them details that can cause them discomfort.

So I decided against showing their stories even though I was running out of time and I didn’t want to make them uncomfortable.

Therefore, I go back to the initial idea of unit 3, look through projection 01.

in projection 01, I talked about how media shaped the stereotype of fujian immigrants, and my audience was mainly Chinese who are actually know what’s happening about fujian immigrants, and I got positive feedback.

but for fujian immigrants who live in the western world, they are invisible and can only be seen on media while the media always report the criminal story. fujian immigrants here are different from fujianese living in living in south east asia where the culture is not that different and they are more welcomed there. For fujian people in the UK, they are invisible and their social issue is neglected.

No one cares.

when I asked fujian immigrants about this issue, they said, yes, this is a problem for them, but they have no more energy to “fight back”. they are busy at doing business and earning money.(-.- yes, money is the most important thing for every fujianese, this is in our gene)

well, what can I do for them as well as myself? money…sorry I can’t do it now…

but what I can do is showing this media issue to broader audience, let western people now that we are from fujian China, we live here, the media report is not fair, the media should not do this.

so as I did more research about how exactly western media shape the narrative, I focused on the vocabulary media use.

their is no published research about the corpus of media report of fujian immigrants, so I learned how to built one.

1. Collecting the corpus. In the Factiva news database, using the search terms “Fujian” and “immigrant,” I selected English news reports and excluded non-Western news agencies. 2. Ranking based on relevance and manually selecting news reports dominated by immigrant narratives. 3. Converting to txt format and cleaning the data, manually deleting irrelevant data. 4. Inputting the formatted reports into AntConc, conducting keyword sorting after excluding common language patterns. 5. Merging synonymous but different parts of speech, exporting the word list.

the result shows the words media used do have bias.

so how to show this to the audience?

I think about TRANSLATION: By extracting some phrases of Fujian immigrants, based on the corpus, translated into English

and the visual language I used is RECEIPT because the receipt is a thing that document fujian immigrants work and also has a concept of translation.

experiment 02: RECEIPT

feedback:

the translation concept is too complicated
the design not explain the whole thing well
try other format, receipt related more about money

week 04-now

the experiment in week 03 is not working, so let’s change, look back at something I made before and what I miss.

the immigration problem is not only happened on fujian immigrants, but also on all the immigrants in the world. so I check the united union, and found something.

this indicate that the narrative about immigration should be reframed.

“narrative” is the thing I never thought about. so what’s the narrative like and how can it be reframed?

by collecting the news coverage, I anaylize the narrative built by media first.

by arranging image make narrative

the feedback I got is not clear enough. add more text to explain

1 the introduction of the whole book

2 image with caption that indicate the resource of the image

3 the chapter is separated by the black page-which is the text taken from the news coverage

all of these making the narrative – following the story of fujian immigrants on media

but how the real fujian immigrants story can be told? the point is fujian immigrants are very sensitive to privacy, so in what way their story can be told?

same way to collect story and image

visual experiment 1

hand writing style? be more about “human””emotion”