Individual Curation — Dorothy Wong
Our project uses tea as a motif to persuade viewers to embrace diversity. Bubble tea is one of the types of tea we want to explore.
The viewer can tell from the vibrant colours of the beverages in the image that they are not traditional tea. The four cups are placed at different levels of depth due to the different sizes and the interpositioning with the lady.
However, my attention was drawn to the lady holding the cups of bubble tea as her arms and the cups form converging lines, where the vanishing point is on her face. Her face is also more brightly lit compared to the foreground (which is the bubble tea on the table) and the background. The reason for the focus on the lady instead of the bubble tea is because this image is retrieved from a 2012 article about the new fad over Taiwanese bubble tea in the UK. This could be a technique that we use to draw attention to or away from the subject.
Moreover, there was an expectation to see an Asian rather than a Caucasian barista preparing bubble tea. Her attire also strangely resembles a scientist’s coat, which seems to be metonymic for the fact that the bubble tea is a new food trend in the UK, where its market potential is still being tested.
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This poster plays against the gestalt principles of continuation for attention. The intentional distortion of the sizes of each body part and their haphazard placement so that there is no smooth continuation of lines to form the ‘woman’ draws attention to each individual body part, which clearly come from people of different skin colour and race. In fact, each of these body parts are portions of faces that are turned towards different directions. Yet, the proximity of these body parts shows their relationship as a whole to form a woman’s body.
The body, coupled with the word ‘diversity’, is a symbolic sign to represent the idea that even though we are all different, coming from different cultural background, having different physical appearances, we are one people. This idea is closely related to our concept which is that “we are all different, but the same”.
Moreover, this image provokes some discomfort due to the jarring composition of the body. This effect on pathos emphasises that inspite of the difficulty and discomfort of embracing diversity and seeing everyone as one people, it has to be done.
This concept could be adapted to fit our project for the last image, where we can compile all the different types of tea we will explore in the previous 7 images, and put them together, to show that even though they are made of different ingredients and placed in different cups traditionally, their differences are what makes tea exciting.
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