As we know, the most distinctive feature of Parsons' application for Parsons is that it emphasizes students' "individuality" and "free development", which has been shown from the requirements for admission of Parsons' works collection, "works collection is not limited to specific majors?"; "Parsons Challenge examines the versatility and development potential of creativity?"; "The collection of works can even be unfinished?" These application requirements are gathered together. It seems that Parsons does not set too many restrictions on applicants, but in fact, these "no requirements" requirements are more stringent. Are Parsons offers really as hard to get as people say? Today, Natural Light will introduce how unrestricted Parsons selects high-quality students with high standards and judges the "artistic potential" of applicants with the following collection of student Parsons' works.
Xinchun student, Parsons' professional work collection of illustration, applying for studying abroad:
Project 01：The Seeker
In the first project, Xinchun designed a simple but highly interesting adventure story, a hunter lost in the forest, trying to find his own tribe. In the process of searching, he experienced mysterious paths, psychedelic trees, and suddenly changed world
Project 02：Beauty&Culture
In this project, Xinchun designed four doll houses under different cultural backgrounds - Chinese culture, British culture, Indian culture and African culture. The costumes of the four main characters in the doll house reflect the characteristics and style of their own countries.
In the early research stage, Xinchun found that different lifestyles, ages, and cultural backgrounds will make people have completely different understanding of aesthetic appreciation. Through a large number of investigations, Xinchun also realized that under different cultural backgrounds, people will use their special decorative elements to show their different understanding of aesthetic standards.
For instance, Xinchun's current aesthetic preference is formed by Chinese local culture and her experience. Therefore, Xinchun is curious about whether her aesthetic standards will change significantly after living in the United States for a period of time. Therefore, she hopes to learn more about different cultures and their aesthetic standards in different countries through this project.
Project 03：Jade Hare
The third project is an adaptation of the ancient Chinese legend of the Jade Rabbit: the Jade Rabbit living on the moon played a prank on the earth, leading to the destruction of a theater. In order to punish the Jade Rabbit, the Buddha proposed that it could not return to the moon until it repented of its hasty and absurd behavior. As a kind of compensation, Yutu became a person who worked in this theatre.
Because the Jade Rabbit is essentially a spirit, it can sing magic. At the same time, when singing a play, it changes from a person to a rabbit. This novel performance soon attracted a large number of audiences. Hare made a lot of money for the theatre in a short time. Finally, he realized his mistake and returned to the moon in a carriage.
Parsons Challenge：Family
The inspiration for this project comes from the work of artist Maurizio Anzeri. But different from his abstract expression, Xinchun made a series of dolls according to the characteristics of family members - mother, father, sister, grandmother and uncle.
Since Xinchun was interested in embroidery since childhood, Xinchun gave full play to his interest and expertise in creation. When choosing the creation method, Xinchun believes that the manual creation form of embroidery and dolls is more three-dimensional and soft than traditional painting, which is more in line with her family's feelings in her mind. At the same time, touchable dolls can also bring more emotional, tactile and visual interactions to the audience.
Yucheng, Parsons Interior Design Collection Application:
Project 01：Seven Deadly Sins Collage
In Christianity, the "seven deadly sins" refer to the seven most deadly human evils - pride, greed, desire, envy, gluttony, anger and laziness. In today's society, all kinds of works on the theme of "Seven Deadly Sins" are very popular, and there are many, including but not limited to comics, games, films, literary works, etc.
The film<Se7en>tells the story of a serial killer who killed people by taking "seven deadly sins" as the way to judge their behavior. After watching this movie, Yucheng thought of a special way to show his understanding of the "Seven Deadly Sins". The most critical connection point/element is "animal".
This inspiration also comes from movies. In more and more animal themed movies, the gorilla/King Kong has always been an enduring classic image/theme. When humans irritate the gorilla again and again, the usually docile gorilla will "go wild". In Yucheng's opinion, the gorilla has become the best embodiment of "anger".
Project 02：Destiny
Sometimes life is like a bird flying to the distant unknown, sometimes it is like exploring the sea. When we encounter danger in life, life will become a gamble, no risk, no gain. In this era of reinforced concrete, everyone is like a bird. Once landed, they will be entangled by thistles and thorns. In this project, Yucheng used the above ideas as inspiration and clues to create paintings.
Project 03：Joke of Clowns
The inspiration and creation of this project originated from the dream of Yucheng when he was young. When he was very young, he often dreamed of clowns. As long as there were clowns, the dream was always a nightmare. Therefore, Yucheng was very afraid of clowns since childhood.
In the process of growing up, he always wanted to overcome his fear and tried to accept the clown bit by bit. Until now, he has overcome his inner fear and learned to accept it instead of imagining the clown who can bring people temporary happiness as something afraid.
The clown without face often appears in Yucheng's childhood nightmares, which has made him dominated by fear for a long time. Therefore, in this collage project, the clown will show a scary side in the form of memory fragments in the early childhood part; The final collage shows that the clown has gradually changed from a frightening image in memory to an amiable and no longer frightening one.
Project 04：JOY，ANGER，MELANCHOLY
In this work, Yucheng uses many different materials to express three different emotions. In the JOY part, cotton represents a beautiful yearning for love. Even the little things in a sweet love can always bring the simplest and sweetest memories.
In ANGER, whenever people are in anger, we tend to be in a critical state of "getting there at one point", which seems to break out at any time. Once anger prevails over reason, blood and anger will occupy all our emotions and psychology.
The last is "depression". When people feel depressed, their hearts are always very empty, just like a black hole. No matter how hard people try, they can't go to the end. At this time, even the voice and emotion of others will make people feel depressed.
Kexuan, Parsons' collection of visual communication professional works, applied for studying abroad
Project 01：How do my emotions compose？
In this Study abroad in visual communication design In the project, Kexuan used his daily necessities as creative elements to complete two collages to express emotions. In these two works, red and blue represent two different emotions, positive and negative.
Kexuan first took photos of his daily necessities, and visually unified them in color to complete his creation. The splash of red objects in the picture represents the excited psychological emotion, and the element of "candy" represents the happy and sweet emotion of people; Ice blue symbolizes people's sadness and depressed mental state. Like the red picture, the details of the blue part also imply some things that make people feel depressed.
Through the transition from blue to red, Kexuan tried to convey the complex idea of gradual transition from one emotion to another: opposite emotions can coexist harmoniously in a person's heart.
Project 02：Emotions
In the last project, Kexun explored people's emotions with colors, while in this project, he explored people's emotions with different texture changes. For example, marbling, whose style is very casual, is the best medium to explore the abstract expression of emotion for this project.
Another example is water lines, which also have the same characteristics. Water will produce different forms in the movement. Combining different colors, it can be regarded as a symbol to exchange emotions. In addition to water ripples and marble, Kexun also thought of using wood to represent calm, and fresh leaves to represent happiness and other abstract meanings.
When the leaves begin to decline, it seems that our emotions will also change, because it will produce more negative and lifeless feelings, such as depression and despair. Through this way of comparison, Kexuan found the resonance between emotion and natural expression.
Project 03：Nature
In this project, Kexuan hopes to use the most basic artistic expression and the most basic primary colors and elements to express the beautiful nature - use the simplest way to describe the most complex things: show depth and light and shadow by hollowing out and overlapping paper layers.
Group I (yellow and black) Collection Inspiration From the moon in the night sky, because this is a still image, Kexuan mainly uses two-dimensional expression forms; The second group of works (blue and white) is inspired by the changing waves and blue sky, which is also a dynamic picture. Therefore, the works of this group are presented by the perspective and overlap of three-dimensional space.
In the process of creating these works, Kexuan added organic elements to pure geometric shapes to express his idea: this is a way to connect the works with the real world. In the specific creation, Kexuan also directly used natural materials such as peppers and roses. The subtle differences and commonalities between these natural elements bring about the third group of works in this series.
Project 04：Diagram on heat zone of earth
There are many ways to express abstract concepts such as time and space, and the distribution of different plants on the earth is one of them. In this work, Kexuan thought of using the leaves of plants from different temperature zones of the earth to illustrate the changes in space. In addition to the differences in plant species, Kexun also shows the characteristics of each area by dealing with color saturation and leaf density. For example, leaves in tropical areas are more dense and saturated than those in temperate areas.
Project 05：Koi Fish Font Design Page
The inspiration and concept of this group of works came from the koi in Kexuan's school pond. Kexuan liked these fish very much, so he took them as his own creative elements, divergent thinking, and designed a set of fonts.
Project 06：Series Collage:OLD but YOUNG
Different from people's usual habitual cognition, some old people in today's society are enjoying their own lives as happily as young people. For example, like people in their golden age, these old people will also participate in competitive sports, go to the gym, dress up and listen to pop music. Inspired by the elderly, Kexun hopes to visually show how their lives are interrelated by juxtaposing the images of the elderly and young people depicted in magazines into one picture, so as to eliminate some stereotypes of the elderly.
Parsons Challenge
The creation of Kexuan's Parsons Challenge started from his own self portrait. In this project, Kexuan hopes to express the identity of different people in different social contexts by showing his understanding of different cultures and nations.
During the research, Kexuan found that people from China, Malaysia and India all have different cultural understanding of scarves, and scarves in each country have very obvious cultural characteristics. Therefore, Kexuan chose to design scarves for three major ethnic groups in Singapore to show their unique but interrelated identities in multi-ethnic communities.
Zhiyi, a student of Parsons' pure art collection, applied for studying abroad
Project 01：A Surgery from Consensus
In this project, Zhiyi discussed such a topic. When people were babies, their ideas were very pure and free of impurities. With the arrival of the information explosion era, people began to be stimulated by all kinds of things and information around them. Some of these information and ideas are not so positive, and they invisibly infected people's pure hearts.
Therefore, Zhiyi injected four kinds of colored liquids, black, green, blue and yellow, into the blood vessels of the heart. It can be expressed as follows: "As time goes by, people's hearts are also changing - as time goes by, people lose the ability to think independently in garbage/negative information.
Project 02：Cages of My Life
In this group of works, Zhiyi expressed "the relationship between social preferences and life at different stages" through a series of sculpture works. Zhiyi found that since her birth, as a child, she has been striving for better education; When she grew up to be an adult, she began to work in a financial company. At this time, she was looking for a better career. From childhood to adulthood, the choice of life seems to have been restricted by the surrounding things, and the change of life is often like from one cage to another.
In this group of sculpture works, Zhiyi has designed three cages, and each cage has a video showing people's life states at different stages - childhood, adulthood, and old age. People are constantly repeating "others' life choices" and the same activities, like Zhiyi, until they choose to be themselves and become an artist, they really started their own life.
Project 03：Escaping the Urban
In this project, Zhiyi drew four abstract landscapes: Hawaiian magma, Alaska glacier, Teton Lake and Miami Sea. At the beginning, Zhiyi thought that through travel, we can get rid of the alienation and indifference of the city. But when she really arrived at some famous and magnificent natural landscapes, she realized that we could not get rid of the feeling of the city. Therefore, she found the cement used on the construction site in the center of Shanghai and applied it in the painting of the natural landscape to show her feelings of conflict.
Project 04：The Filter of Death-Grandmom’s Bedroom
In the fourth project, Zhiyi abstractly expressed her memory of her grandmother by combining plane graphic elements with strong color contrast. Zhiyi's family once had a fierce dispute with her grandmother. However, these bad meetings disappeared at her funeral. Everyone's memories of her were all good.
This made Zhiyi wonder whether death would affect our memory and help us filter out some bad things in our memory? And let the good memories remain forever? So in this project, Zhiyi made a deep thinking by comparison.
Ruoyu, Parsons Design and Technology
Project 01：United Animal Hospital
The first project was inspired by the experience of Ruoyu's classmate and friend, who complained that waiting in the pet hospital is a very boring and boring thing, because you often need to spend 45 minutes or more to wait.
This makes Ruoyu wonder whether we can have other activities to "consume" boring time in the pet hospital besides waiting? This project came into being.
Project 02：Choice Maker
The continuous development of science and technology provides more choices for mankind. However, at the same time, too many choices have also led to human "deviation". The inspiration for this project comes from the concept in the play "Black Mirror". Technology is a double-edged sword for human beings. The premise for designers to create objects is to bring convenience to people. The emergence of different products will give people "best" solutions to varying degrees. But if people use these facilities in war or some violent events, What will happen? This makes people think: Do we really have the "best" choice in our life and society? Therefore, Ruoyu discussed her ideas with us through this project.
Project 03：Artechouse
This project is a redesign of the visual system of Artehouse, because Ruoyu found that the original visual system of Artehouse was not consistent with its own brand and product tonality, so he decided to redesign a series of visual systems for it.
In this process, Ruoyu created a random aesthetic concept combining art and technology. Instead of using a specific color or figure as a unified visual element, she used a mathematical function called Bacteria Function, which combines the numbers A and B (where A< B) Insert it into the function to create a circular area graph with two organic closed shapes.
These figures have a high sense of mystery and future technology, and are very suitable for Artehouse. In the opinion of Ruoyu, mathematics is technology and design is art. The process of inserting numbers and obtaining shapes is the interaction between her and technology, which fully reflects the characteristics of Artehouse.
Project 04：My Own Misery
Compared with the previous "extroverted" projects, this project is a very personal project, which is a record of Ruoyu's emotions and emotions. After Ruoyu graduated from college, she returned to Shanghai, but the feeling of loneliness began to envelop her. Even though she shared the same life and spoke the same language with people around her, this feeling was eroding her.
So Ruoyu decided to show his feelings and emotions in the form of vision. She used two parts to express, the first part, combining video and dynamic display; The second part extracts the elements in the video for visual static expression.
Summary:
These students not only got Parsons School of Design An offer from a Parsons college, from the application of these students' Parsons portfolio, we can conclude some "commonalities":
-Parsons' portfolio application is at the undergraduate stage, which emphasizes more students' creativity and expression dimensions than the major itself:
From the above collection of works, we can easily see that the collection of works of many students does not seem to be directly related to the application for majors. As Parsons himself said on his official website, your collection of works does not have to be closely related to your major, as long as your works can reflect your creative ability and thinking consciousness.
-In the undergraduate stage, creative expression does not have to be presented as a complete project:
In these collections above, we will find that many students' collections may end in a single page. Compared with the collections we have seen in the past, which have a complete creative process and creative expression, and are displayed step by step, Parsons' collection application is more expressive for students. Whether students have open ideas and can find the most unusual presentation form in the theme of "simple". When we synthesize the whole set of works, we will also find that the "ability expression" presented by different sets of works is highly complementary. Different works have different focuses, but they are connected with each other, and will comprehensively display students' abilities in different fields and dimensions.
-At the master's stage, Parsons' portfolio application is very important for students' creativity and expression ability, but the extension of the theme of the portfolio also needs attention:
Take the last student Ruoyu as an example. In addition to self portraits and observational paintings, several theme works of the project are not only very complete in expression form but also highly creative. At the same time, each theme itself has the meaning of teaching deep thinking and exploration. For applicants, a single thinking dimension and presentation form is not enough in the application of master's stage. Students also need to have the ability to put ideas into specific projects and themes, which is actually a deep requirement for professionalism.
Different art schools have different application requirements. We often say that Parsons' collection application is very "free", but this "freedom" is not an indulgence and unlimited expression of students' art. On the contrary, Parsons gives students more space to show themselves just to see more possibilities and hidden potentials of students. For students, how to use this "space" and "freedom" is the most important.
Natural light shares more topics for you:
Why are Parsons not specialized in his first year of undergraduate study? What are the advantages?
Is it easy for DIY to apply to Parsons School of Design? How to efficiently use Parsons official website to apply?
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