The commonalities between the art forms of The Endangered Earth and The

Both installation art and animation are closely related to postmodernism, since installation art is the 'focal point of Postmodernism' (Janson & Janson 2003, p.955), while animation is a form of popular culture. The two art forms have some similar postmodern artistic features, which provide the perspective to analyze the process of this practice, and to evaluate the outcome and strategies that I used in the production process.

(1) Creating the hermetic space as both context and content of the art work

Both The Hero's Journey and The Endangered Earth create their own hermetic spaces which can be considered as both context and content of the art work. When viewing The Endangered Earth, spectators are within its physical space; when watching The Hero's Journey, the audience's viewpoint is in the post-apocalypse world and the mental spaces of this animation. The space of The Hero's Journey is depicted on screen as a part of this animation, and it is the context of the story.

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The space is one of the decisive aspects of The Endangered Earth. Like many other installation artists, I used the space of exhibition to create the space of my art work. In The Endangered Earth, the appearance of elements (e.g. the computer cases) is to a large extent decided by their positions in the space of the work, and their relationship with other elements.

The space of The Endangered Earth endows the meaning of the objects in it; it also creates a certain atmosphere to engage viewers. Every sub-work of The Endangered Earth creates its own space; meanwhile, in the exhibition, the re-assembled art work uses the environment of the art gallery and creates its space. I built the space as a part of the contents of the work, and also used it as the context for its components.

In The Hero's Journey, the virtual post-apocalypse ruin and several dream-like worlds form the story space; they form the hermetic space of this story. In animation there are two animating spaces: the space within which animators work (e.g. the space of paper), and the virtual space that is created by the animator (Telotte 2010). The former is similar to the screen space, and the latter is the story space that characters are in. The motion pictures work on screen provides the experience, and audiences get this experience through watching the film (Bordwell & Thompson 2008; Peng 1991; Buckland 2009). Thus the post-apocalypse world is considered as the space of the experience of the story of The Hero's Journey, and I have paid great attention to this space (see Chapter 5). It is a part of the content of The Hero's Journey, as it is displayed on screen; meanwhile it is also the context of the story. The space explains the motivation of characters, endows elements with new meanings, and also shapes the atmosphere and tone.

Animation has the attractive capacity to manipulate, enliven and create space (Telotte 2010), and I took this advantage in the process of creating the space of The Hero's Journey. A post-apocalyptic world and other dream-like spaces were created, and I used montage to connect them and to constitute the space of the whole story. My personal experience of ordinary life was an essential part of the process of creating the post-apocalypse world, as the post-apocalypse world in this project was created through my imagination which uses the landscape of my hometown as its prototype (see 5.2.1).

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I considered the story of The Hero's Journey as an experience that is created by imagination;

like other forms of films, this experience is gained by audiences in the process of viewing the moving image. The narrative provides a means of articulating experiences and perceptions, and gives the shape of the understanding (Klich 2005). The Hero's Journey creates the virtual space for the experience of its story. The space makes the animation work similar to my installation artifact which set up borders to create physically separate spaces.

To avoid confusing the more common sense of space (the generalized physical extent) with the space of the experience that is provided by animation, in this exegesis I coin the term 'timespace' to indicate the latter. The timespace is created by the animation and has its spatial and temporal attributes; it also has its borders and thus is an enclosed scope of time and space.

In an animation, the 'timespace' is largely overlapped with the concepts of story time and story space; and it is created by the artwork. A timespace can be represented as a 'world', a 'universe', or a 'domain'. It can be nonphysical, such as cyberspace, dream or memory; or can infer a certain period of a space, for example, 'London in The Great War' (see Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)) or 'the post-apocalypse world' in this project. A timespace is independent of other timespaces, and forms of connections are between two timespaces. In certain genres of films, the spaces of experience are constituted by multiple smaller timespaces (e.g. the matrix world and the real world in The Matrix (1999), or different layers of dreams in Inception (2010)). In such genres, the timespace of the story is the sum of all timespaces in the story. In The Hero's Journey, each section has its own timespaces, for example, section 1 contains the timespace of the post-apocalypse world and of ordinary life. The timespace of the whole story is considered as the sum of the timespaces of the five sub-stories.

The space of The Hero's Journey comprises the post-apocalypse timespace, the ordinary timespace and a number of dream-like timespaces. The screenplay of The Hero's Journey is based on the post-apocalypse fantasy, and timespaces help the narrative. Audiences will firstly see the two-timespaces structure in section 1. This section is like a road movie, and it emphasizes the post-apocalypse world since the storyline in this timespace has longer time duration. The details of the post-apocalypse world are conveyed to audiences, and this section

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may remind audiences of the beginning of The Road (2009), in which the narrative moves between the memory (dream) of ordinary life and the post-apocalyptic reality. Section 2 continues the post-apocalypse story line of section 1, and enhances the post-apocalypse tone:

whatever the understanding of section 1 the audiences have reached, the narrative in section 2 will progress the story in the post-apocalypse timespace. It may make audiences temporarily believe that the post-apocalypse timespace in section 1 is the reality. According to the conventions of the post-apocalypse genre, the story gives the expectation of being a fable of the self-destruction of humanity; and the depiction of the post-apocalypse world sets a context of the story. Some plots such as suicide in the two sections also provide a hopeless and cruel atmosphere. This post-apocalyptic context is initially built by sections 1 and 2, and is the framework of the following storylines. From section 3 onwards, the story shows an apparent tendency to depart from the 'reality'; instead the storyline enters unrealistic timespaces.

Unrealistic elements remind audiences that the timespaces on screen are nonphysical. These sections begin with different forms of entering (e.g. dropping into) new timespaces, and end with leaving timespaces. However, the natures of audiences tend to consider the story integral (Arnheim 1958; Bordwell & Thompson 2008). Thus the post-apocalyptic context that has been built in section 1 and 2 is retained, and the interpretations of the following section are based on this context.

(2) Hyperreal forms

In the hermetic space of the work, both The Endangered Earth and The Hero's Journey produce rather than represent reality, their spaces are thus hyperreal. Developed from Baudrillard (1994), hyperrealism is one of the commonalities between installation art and animation. As Davidson & Desmond (1996) state, both installation art and motion pictures are hyperrealistic forms.

The hermetic space of The Endangered Earth aims to be defamiliarized from reality. The space shows a certain extent of randomness, as well as showing the feature of flawed statue which neglects to optimize the direct appearance.

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The virtual world of The Hero's Journey is created as 'real'; it emerges in imagination, and is displayed on screen. In the hyperreal condition of this animation, the 'fiction' and 'real' are seamlessly blended, as the fictional post-apocalypse world is the reality for the characters in this story. Not only the space but also the time in The Hero's Journey are created and manipulated by this work. In this work, some scenes are unfaithful reproductions of the real world, and they are placed in the fictional post-apocalypse world which does not exist. These scenes do not represent reality but produce it.

In creating both the two artworks I dismissed the thought of mimesis that considers art works as imitation of nature and human behavior (Potolsky 2006; Campbell 2005). Instead I created the space of the two art works, and also the time of The Hero's Journey; the artifacts worked on the scope of sensory perception. Thus the hermetic spaces that are created by The Endangered Earth and The Hero's Journey provide the hyperrealistic context that is similar to Baudrillard's notion of Disneyland as an exemplar of hyperreality. The spaces in The Hero's Journey and The Endangered Earth reflect and adopt the characteristics of simulacrum (Baudrillard 1994). The two art works provide immersive experience, and in the subjective process of viewing, a viewer can only be sure of his own thoughts based on his own sensory perceptions.

(3) Allegoric expression

In The Hero's Journey and The Endangered Earth I avoided imposing arbitrary and explicit meaning on audiences. I expressed ideas in allegoric and symbolic manners, as the two works produce reality rather than represent it.

In The Hero's Journey I referenced allusions from different cultures, such as Christian scriptures and Chinese ancient myths; these works made this project more allegoric. There are pre-existing allegoric conventions and techniques of animation such as exaggeration and personification (Liu & Wang 2010; Lent 2001; Besen 2003; Chang 2009), and I employed them in the process of production.

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For example, in the dream-like space in section 4, the protagonist finds a monkey tail on himself, and the tail transforms into a serpent; the protagonist joins the picnic of gods; he eats a fruit that the snake protects, and the fruit transforms into the planet earth. I combined different ideas in this allegoric segment, including ideas from Darwinism, animism and religious stories from different cultures; it thus possesses features of intertextuality, parody and pastiche. This segment expresses the idea that mankind forgets they are still a part of the eco-system but consider themselves as god, and also the idea of humanity consuming the world.

An allegory conveys its sub-text in symbolic manners; it has traditionally been regarded as inferior to symbol, and they are both large-scale expressions of conceptual metaphor (Crisp 2005). As one type of sign that has 'conventional connection between it and its object' (Williams 2004, p.239), the symbol is an essential device of The Endangered Earth; it allegorically and metaphorically expresses ideas. I designed most elements of this work as symbols to express greater ideas; some works, for example, The Tower and The Metal Casket were considered symbols in their entirety. I used conventional symbols, such as the skull and withered plants; and also used interpretive ones, through endowing them with special meanings in the specific context. I used found objects this installation work, and considered them as symbols.

The symbol is also an essential device that I used in The Hero's Journey to express ideas. As I discussed in Chapter 5, I designed symbols when creating characters and the virtual spaces. I used conventional symbols (e.g. the cola-can as a symbol of consumerism), and put them in the post-apocalypse space that is created by this animation, in which some conventional symbols were endowed new meaning and were transformed into interpretive symbols. The fictional story occurs in the virtual space and is connected to ordinary experiences. I designed visual symbols (a representation embodies a concept (Wittkower 1977)) to express ideas, to progress the storyline, and to drive audiences to connect different scenes. The symbol also helps the strategy of ambiguity I used to create an open story in this project (see 6.2.3), since the interpretation of symbol is a subjective process with great margin of misinterpretation,

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and may lead to diversified understandings of the settings of the story.

In this project, the application of found works is also symbolic, since they are appropriated and remixed with other works in a new context to express different meanings. I further discuss this in 6.3.

(4) Eclecticism and hybridity

Eclecticism and hybridity are reflected in both the art work and the production process of The Endangered Earth and The Hero's Journey. They are closely related to the use of multiple techniques and materials.

In The Endangered Earth I employed different materials to created different works with different themes, and then used them to construct the whole work. In this process, techniques from multiple disciplines were applied, including painting, graphic design, photography, sculpture and performance. I also used found objects; this process was a collage and reflected eclectic and hybrid features, and also involved the appropriation of readymades. Through placing different material in one space, the work as an entirety was created. Therefore, The Endangered Earth is neither limited to one single art discipline, nor to certain materials or mediums.

The Hero's Journey shows strong eclecticism and hybridity in different layers, as animation is the hybridization of different disciplines (Daly 2009; Chang 2009; Moore 2007). This work uses multiple production techniques, and thus combines different aesthetics. The readymades I used in this project also bring the style of their original works. The remix of readymades also shows the cultural diversity. Since the story originates from three different small stories, their different themes are picked and mixed. The story combines SF and the supernatural; it mixes elements from different cultures, for example, the Bible stories and the Chinese creation myth of Pangu. These features are also reflected in the scope of visual design. For example, I designed the tree with altars of different religions (Figure 36) in section 4, and also used it in the montage pictures segment in the animation. The altar-tree is one of the most

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representative examples of eclecticism and hybridity in this work. It is a work of pastiche, as it collects religious buildings with distinctive styles from more than one culture. In other parts of my work, found artifacts from different cultures, eras and styles have been used (see 5.4 and 5.5); they cover a huge range from the Chinese Neolithic pottery to Duchamp's Fountain.

These works bring diversified elements into my project.

Figure 36 The tree with altars