Michelle Wang

Appellations

The action of giving a name to a person or thing.

PERSONAL STORY

It was a bad day to be outside and yet I found myself right there, standing in the middle of a storm. And then I saw it.

A small helpless shape lay before me. Worried for it’s safety, I stepped in its path, delicately picking it up and bringing it with me to a safe place. I placed it in a clean plastic container and watched it revive. I dreamed of the day it’ll turn into the beautiful butterfly it was meant to be. Little did I know, the moment I picked it up, that I was bringing it to its death.

It was a beautiful day; the caterpillar finally transformed into a graceful butterfly.

Living in captivity within my home was no place for such a beauty of nature. Taking it outside, I brought it outside and gently nudged it onto a leaf. The moment it left my hand, it was dead. In the blink of an eye, a bird had snatched the butterfly and carried its lifeless body into the sky.

All I could do was stand there and helplessly stare as the bird flew further and further away until it finally disappeared from my sight.

CONCEPT: Humans coexist with animals. As sentient beings, we naturally project our subjective thoughts and perceive the world differently. After my experience with the caterpillar, I started questioning my role in the natural world as a human. Part of me thought I was doing the “right” thing for the caterpillar, but I may have just cut its life short by interfering with its way of life. In my series of prints, I examined these ideas of life and human interference.

01. LIFE: Flowers, insects, reptiles, and birds naturally form this food chain that starts and ends in a cycle of life and death. Nature is created based on thousands and thousands of such intricate systems woven into each other.

02. CRUELTY: Nature is not all sparkles and rainbows. Within the natural systems are seemingly cruel ways that animals must act to harm others to live and survive.

03. OPPOSITION: Human interference starts to take a more apparent appearance. Taking the form of a monster, humans start to manifest in a more apparent presence. Shackled to each other, the non compatible creatures are locked in a desperate bid to survive.

04. IMPRISONMENT: Once humans involve themselves to an extensive degree, then we truly are actively destroying nature’s livelihood. By defensively posing within nature, humans continue partaking in the destruction of nature while passively standing aside.

05. ACCEPTANCE: Growing from the remains of the end, flowers continue to bloom and the cycle of life restarts. Although its natural state has been disrupted and potentially changed forever, nature will always remain as it is, from now until the end of time.