Westwold Needs Asia

Dr. Jennifer D. Lee’s Penultimate Review Presentation

2018

• I was commissioned to design a poster for Professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee’s  penultimate review presentation in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Jennifer D. Lee is a scholar who specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese art and East Asian studies.
• To visually foreshadow the theme of the talk and its comparative approach, I juxtaposed the image of Dolores from Westworld (2016) and the poster titled, Border Calvary (1978), created just after the Cultural Revolution period in China.
• Part of the presentation focused on essays written by the literary scholar, Liu Zaifu, on the subject of rebuilding the public’s subjectivity damaged by the Cultural Revolution. In these essays, Liu analogized the process of writing a character to creating an AI that will eventually awaken and gain its free will. To visualize the subject, I overlapped the symbol of the communist five-pointed star with the maze from Westworld symbolizing the robots’ self-awakening.