aouyang-wunderkammer

aouyang-wunderkammer

When COVID started in spring 2020, I found myself in isolation at home with few activities to fill my days, looking for something beyond just the monotony of doing psets every day. This led me to explore the humanities and various art forms in greater depth.

Despite the chaos and uncertainty of the pandemic, I discovered a sense of stability and permanence in the arts –– that people from different times and places shared similar aesthetic pursuits, revealing some kind of commonality that transcendeds cultural and temporal boundaries. Furthermore, the way works refer to and build upon one another gives rise to a network of intertextuality that embodies a shared human experience.

Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences” depicted a synesthetic experience in which sensory perceptions –– colors, sounds, and scents –– become intertwined in the brain. Inspired by the poem’s portrayal of synesthesia, I sought to capture a similar essence of interconnectedness between different art forms through a collection of color palettes named after and inspired by the various works I encountered during the COVID era.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Oj29nw7NibuneqmE4kIX3PESKNjLuJNUlFDccct-z5E/edit?usp=sharing