Model A
Chenguang Deng
After exposing the order found in existing Chinese institutions, I want to use visual language to showcase the hidden tensions that underlay its order may be reconsidered. The infrastructures of schools reflect the society’s attitudes towards education, and its expectations of the younger generations. Model A as a para-fictional modern high school I imagine, I create a restrained revolution from formality. From the overview plan of a school, to the main part of a school—classrooms, and the seating patterns within the classrooms, then to the management of each individual student, the system seeks to sand down our edges and eventually make us a unified, simple, easy-to-manage group.
In the first part, I used 100 archival images of schools’ maps to create a sampling of a modern high school in China. They share the highly similar compositions and repetitive structures. In the second part, Units, I designed a booklet showcasing the most common six types of seating patterns and six matching posters to illustrate the hidden tension under the classrooms’ structure. In the third part, Unit, I archived and re-edited about 200 images of students in schools, zooming in further to explore us as human beings and relationships between us and the surroundings.