1. Exhibition design
2. Animation
3. Poster design
4.Card design

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR A PERSON TO BECOME AN APPLE?

This project explores how people deal with death and how they relate to animals, plants, or humans to face the fear of departure. When a person dies, part of their body is bound to return to nature. Death is just a transformation of a human's molecules into another form of existence.

Through animation and posters, this project addresses the distance from life to life and how we can relieve our pain when someone important around us dies. For some people, animals,or plants, death is not a final departure. Their souls will be with us forever and our genes will still be alive — just in a different living format.

My friend’s puppy got sick recently and the doctor said it had less than two months to live. My friend was studying in the United States at the time, which made it impossible to go back to China, because of the epidemic, Beijing’s strict control (because of the Winter Olympics),  very expensive airfare and a month of quarantine, even though she really wanted to go back and care for her puppy.

This incident made me think about the distance from life to life, how we could relieve our pain when important lives around us leave. I am often afraid that some important life will leave me, and everything will become unbearable.

Does life end when people die and are buried in the ground? I don’t think so, I want to prove that death is continuous, swirling cycle of life. I hope this project helps me to face death, see death from an unconventional perspective, understand the diversity of death and life, about the regeneration and continuation of life.

Creating a video allowed me to combine illustration, color, typography and sound together to help people understand my concept better. For the voiceover, I found a Chinese child to talk about death to explain my concept and process; and I found a native English speaker to ask the boy a question: “What do you think death looks like?”. This kind of communication across time, culture, language, and various external conditions was very satisfying.

The outcomes of my thesis investigation include 20 little illustrations to explain how I see the cycle of life and death. The process is, at first, people are an egg cell, then they become fetuses in their mother’s womb waiting to be born, a few months later, they are born in the world, they start to have conscious, learn to talk and walk, start to make friends, fall in love with someone, they will be happy or sad. They will become old when they have experienced something; one day, they die. But that’s not the end of the story; when individuals are buried in the ground, they will become organic, start to regenerate, become part of the seed, grow branches and flowers. They will become a tree, and everyone can become an apple at the end of the story. But the apple is just a metaphor; technically, you can be whatever creature you want to be.

The poster’s function is to explain my concept to the audience better, and I use the Risograph to print these posters; at the same time, I also made a lot of small badge posters. 

When I talked to my teachers, they all suggested that I add a section to let the audience participate in my project because it’s too subjective to only focus on my thoughts, everyone’s ideas will be different; I asked visitors to the exhibition to answer two questions:“What do you think death looks like?” and “What do you want to be after you die?”

It is the participation of the audience that allows me to truly accomplish my work. Thanks to the people who participated, each of us is going through different things, living different lives, and have different personalities, but maybe we have the same or different perception of death. It was interesting to gather diverse opinions about death as part of my process.