BFA Thesis concept- Urban Flânerie and Zen Philosophy

Urban flâneur is not a new concept historically. Artists, such as Impressionists, Surrealists, and SG (Situationist Group), often wandered around a city, looking for artistic inspiration or used the walking activity itself as an art practice. Unlike the times when they lived, however, today’s cities have become ever more complex, with combinations of western and eastern ideas, new and old lifestyles, man-made environments and nature. We are living in the age of the Internet where high-tech navigational systems allow us to find directions and explore cities without actually being there. Despite the existence of digital maps and GPS, the urban flâneur remains vividly alive among contemporary artists. People still enjoy drifting around various parts of cities, marketplaces, and non-descript streets, searching for an exciting and new realization of the world.

My visual research is based on the practice of urban drift and the notion of Zen Buddhism where opposing elements of the world can be united into one entity. I conducted a series of urban drift by walking quickly for an effective deviation from common pathways. While we tend to hastily assume that a human-built environment is in opposition to nature, I realized through urban drift that the two types of environments seem to be merged into another new world rather than being totally discrete worlds. Another aspect which I found from urban drift was that one’s experience of a city is multi-dimensional. Since urban drift involves time, a full employment of the senses beyond the visual, such as sound, smell and subjective emotion is required. SG artists combined subjective and objective maps together to tackle the existing conditions of capitalist cities, opening up a new form of city perception. For the series of my paintings, I utilized the method of SG’s “detournment” (recreating a city in a purposefully disorienting way), Dada’s “chance operation” (drawing lines quickly by removing rational thoughts or plans), and “planned coincidence” (making a next mark based on preceding visual marks to create an unpredictable, but unifying composition).