Hao Wei

We decorate our nights with dreams

Dreams are ornaments of our life

We decorate our days with jewellery

Jewellery is an ornament of our material world

In Hao’s project, she explores the connection between dreams, where dreams are kept, their dimensions, decorative aspects, and desire to eat. One part of her graduation project is about her dream stories, and the other part is about creating dimensional structures to protect the inner desires in her dreams.

In this part of the dream story, she used visual graphics to show the personal stories and physical experiences in her dreams. In this part, she recorded an eating story to create a dream wonderland, which is not only a monologue of inner desires, but is also based on visual material – a ‘daily residue’.

The other part is about how to understand the dimensional relationship between an individual's inner and outer worlds, how to preserve the ‘fleeting moments’ from dreams and how to share personal dreams with other people in the real world.

As A Dreamer – Hao’s dreams and dream containers 

Andre Breton believed that Surrealism could resolve the conflict that has always existed between dreams and reality, and achieve an absolute reality, a transcendent reality. In her work, Hao focuses on her dreams and the notion of a dream supplement container to create a structure for protecting our inner world, and explores how to use this supplement container to show this world in a different dimensional space. The structure of her theme is based on the narrative of personal dreams. It uses fictive metaphors to express subject-dimensional relationships. Metaphors are the graphic language of dream-making. The expression of metaphor enables the creative language of dreams to penetrate the creation of the material world, which enables our dream world and our real world to become a continuous space. When the subjective connection between the dream and real space is constructed, subjective mental cognition can be combined with the transcending of conventional knowledge to create a transcendent world. Hao conjures infinite space in the same world from a circumscribed realm between different worlds and dimensions.

To demonstrate the relationship between different worlds and dimensions, she created a self-invoking fictive structure: ‘within’ and ‘boundary’ are the two most important terms for expressing the structural relationship in this. In relation to ‘within’, as Freud explains in The Interpretation of Dreams our dreams address the ‘day residue’ with subjective creation to reorganise images and spaces to satisfy our hidden desires. Therefore, the purpose of dream narration is to create a container for storing our desires, so that desires and moments from dreams can be stored and protected as metaphorical elements and space in the story. ‘Within’ as a way of describing visually portrays the depth of field which is created by different metaphors in the personal narrative. In terms of ‘boundary’, these are the end of each space and distinguish between different spaces (creating a closed space) and build connections between different spaces (creating an open space). The thickness of the boundary decides the status of openness and closure. When the boundary becomes thicker, it will add to the level of space and show the protection of hidden desire from the inner world. When the boundary becomes very thin, two different spaces can become a whole and create a mutually penetrative space. The boundary in this structure also implies the dimensional structure(size/position/dimension).

From the point of view of art practice and art form, Hao uses drawing, animations, installations and objects as tools to express her dimensional concept, and mixed media to express spatial relations within this, breaking the limitations of a single media and language. Using jewellery as a part of her creative theme, she considers how to combine jewellery design with other art forms to show her dimensional concept for producing jewellery and a supplementary  jewellery showcase in multiple ways.