Davide Vanacore

This work shares some similarity with the second one. Instead of using 'To buy or not to buy', I write 'To be a product, or to be a human being?' The figure in the image is split into two sections: The one that represents the 'product' is coloured blue and holds a phone with the facebook page; and the one that represents the 'human being' is coloured green with a bunch of flowers held in the hand. I chose blue in the 'product' part is because the most popular social networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all coloured blue, which I am not certain whether it is just a coincidence. Green is the colour of nature, livelihood and vigour, which is essential to maintain the human beings. However, we are overly occupied by the social media in our spare time. How many people are staying at home and browsing the webpage and posts of social networks instead of going out to enjoy the freedom and freshness brought by nature? We are busy making connec...

This piece is painting is rather simple and straightforward. Hamlet 's famous quote 'To be, or not to be, that is the question' inspired the use of the texts 'To buy, or not to buy' in the painting, which demonstrates a typical scene in the modern society with consumerism enhanced by the emergence of online shopping, which not only breaks the traditional limit of time and space in transaction, delivery and collection of shopping items, but also increases the chance of unnecessary and redundant shopping and over-consumption. People are always tempted to make more shopping when it is done online due to its convenience and freedom, which only brings a temporary sense of satisfaction, but regret is often coming soon when we realise that what we purchased is totally a waste. 'To buy, or not to buy?' This is a question probably encountered by everyone who ever shopped. There is a wide variety of commodities available in the developed countries now, it is unavoid...

Apparently, there is a big hierarchical discrimination illustrated in this painting: the wealthy woman and man with luxury car and dressings are walking on the wide paths with yellow carpets in the middle of the painting. In contrast to this, a bunch of working class, completely homogeneous and cannot be differentiated, walk on two paths, one leading to the entrance of a castle of offices and one from the exit. The only thing the working class is holding is the briefcase where their staff number printed on it. The life size of security staff and wealthy class is also bigger than the working class, which indicated the higher social status of the former. Although this sort of image is not often seen in reality, but the intangible gap between different social classes truly exist and is intensified gradually with the uneven and unequal allocation and distribution of wealth  for decades. The top 5% rich class is occupying more and more percentage of total wealth, leaving more...

Before I transferred from DFSA to Fine Art, I took such a self-portrait that half of me is with make-up, female bracelet and  nails polished in red, which is to represent the coexistence and balance of man and woman. I believe any two opposite concepts are not completely exclusive to each other, as there is no absolute 'black' and and absolute 'white'. A man could have the exquisite emotions and a woman could have the courage, adventurous spirit, ration and reasoning. 'Complementary' should be preferred over 'contrary' and we can always find the balance to maintain the coexistence of multiple matters. During the screen printing workshop and further attendance of the printing studio, I remake my previous self-portrait with printing. The original colours are replaced with solely red and black. Red and Black are quite frequently mentioned together in art and literature as the sharp contrast made by these two colours rendered them the possibility to re...

Modern artworks demonstrate its creativity, diversity and conceptuality largely based on the multimedia available now thanks to the technological development. With the advent of smart phone, single lense high quality images are ubiquitous, but gradually filled with vulgarity due to the overuse of modification methods to remove the imperfection from the images. Do we still know how we really look like? Should I believe that this is how my partner and I look like? I've never seen such faces of us. But they are scanned and produced from a printer, which has the high credibility of replication and authenticity. Are the figures produced from the printer are more real than those that I observed through my bare eyes?  There are more meanings in this work beyond the reflection of the originality of our facial presentations. In order to optimize the effects of photocopying images, it has to be conducted in an absolutely dark environment. Does it take any courage to be explosed in ...

This resolved piece was displayed in the studio crit show. It is a upper body life-sized statue made of metal pieces with the hard paper stuffed in its head. As we had workshop about different sorts of material and also had 'Materiality' in Critical Dialogue sessions, I was fascinated with the resilience, strength and plasticity of metal pieces and strongly tempted to do a metal-made statue.  This work has the basic and essential structures of human skeletons, but it's not a pure replication and reprodcution of human bodies. Compared with metal, human tissues and apparatus have its fragility and vulnerablity, but it has its own biological mechanism which facilitated its constant updating and internal renewal and provided lasting livelihood.  The difference and complementarity between metal and human flesh, one with advantages in the physical sense, one in the biological sense, offers this world with inifnite potential and possibility in material exploitation and develop...

The concept of Memory palyed a significant role in determining the direction and topics of my works in the first and second self-initiated projects. Memory, as a part our essential cognitive ability, is crucial in shaping our life patterns and identities, which estalishes the continuity between the past, the present and the future. Individual and collective memory interact with each other and altogether provided a unique archiving resource for the traces of our personal and social life. The preservation of memory cannot be realized without documentation throguh certain media, which could be texts, still and moving images, audio recordings and so on. I conduct one of the resolved works in my first self-initiated project through photocopying the body parts of me and my partner, particularly the facial features. The increasing popularity of photoshop and beauty modes to remove the facial and bodily imperfection perceived  by people before they publish them in the social media in or...

There are so many contrasts in modern society: people from two sides of the world can be connected easily through social media, but we are not communicating with our neighbors any more; we can know how a place far from us looks like by searching videos and images, however, we will have to use Google map to find a place very close to us; we invent very advanced camera in order to capture the details of the world to the most authenticity, but meanwhile we use Photoshop, beauty modes to conceal our original and natural appearance...Is everything working for their initial purpose, or completely diverting to the opposite? There is no certainty in answering this question. I personally feel that we are living with increasing confusion. On the one hand, convenience brought by high technology to our life massively broadened the temporal and spatial realm that we can reach. But on the other hand, we are locked into our daily routine, required to follow our schedule with punctuality, subject to a...

Giovanni Battista   Piranesi  ( 4 October 1720 – 9 November 1778) was an Italian artist famous for his etchings  of Rome  and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" ( Le Carceri d'Invenzione ). The  Prisons  ( Carceri d'invenzione  or 'Imaginary Prisons'), is a series of 16 prints produced in first and second states that show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines. These images influenced Romanticism  and Surrealism . While the Vedutisti  (or "view makers") such as Canaletto  and Bellotto , more often reveled in the beauty of the sunlit place, in Piranesi this vision takes on what from a modern perspective could be called a Kafkaesque  distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthine structures, epic in volume. They are capricci , whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and ruin. The series was started in 1745. The first state prints were published in 1750 and consisted of 14 etchings, unt...