The Graphic Hair (a Remake, a Real/Fake): A Museum in SGV

The culture of exports, remakes, and other forms of mutations brings to question the notion of the “real”. In particular, such ideas of “authentic” identities represented by human artifacts undergo morphologies during times of human diaspora. Architecture, graphic signage, art, and other communicative matters are some of the common places where “the real” enters a state of high plasticity. Generic verisimilitude is the plausibility of a fiction within the bounds of its own genre.Comparing this thought process to the high-resolution / low-resolution Lion Kings between 2019 and 1994, there is a story about the construction of characters that humans can empathize with. Between the life-like high-resolution hair of 2019 and the abstract low-resolution graphic of 1994, low resolution is one that can deliver a cartoon with much more expressive characters.

The design project of this studio is a new Chinese American Museum (CAM), set to be located in San Gabriel Valley where we will look at the new Chinese immigrants’ relationship with the existing SGV before their arrival, as well as comparisons with various eras of Chinatowns through the understanding of the real/fake, verisimilitude, and differing levels of resolution.