Foreign Lands, Familiar Stars, MFA Thesis, 2021
Time / 7 months
Role / Artist, UI & UX Designer, Web Developer, Researcher
Tools / Figma, Adobe Photoshop, HTML & CSS
Advisors / Richard The, Anna Harsanyi, David Carroll, Chris Prentice
Content As Self-Portrait
Foreign Lands, Familiar Stars is a series of self-portraits of a millennial immigrant.
This project is a reflection and artistic exploration of personal experiences. It’s raw, emotional, and complex. It’s documented and presented in the form of a web journal.
The title of this project illustrates the diasporic experience of migration and cultural belonging. It also conceptualizes the core memories of a third cultural child.
View project (desktop only) → Foreign Lands, Familiar Stars
user journey as storytelling
The project website is structured in a way that helps the viewer to understand the project narrative.
LANDING PAGE → FOREIGN LANDS / FAMILIAR STARS (LANDING → CATEGORY)
On the landing page, viewers are asked to choose between two categories. They each represent the native culture and the second & third culture.
Foreign Lands: Second & third culture
Familiar Stars: Native culture
FOREIGN LANDS / FAMILIAR STARS ↔ CONTENT (CATEGORY ↔ PROJECTS)
Under each category, a collection of projects are presented by their titles. The titles are in the romanized Hakka language, which is spoken by my family.
Each project has a Hakka title and an English title. As a part of the project, the Hakka vocabulary is briefly explained on each content page.
FOREIGN LANDS ↔ FAMILIAR STARS (CATEGORY ↔ CATEGORY)
Foreign Lands and Familiar Stars are not directly linked to each other. The only way to access the other world is through a content page titled Internal Monologue.
Internal Monologue displays the journal entries made during the making of this project. It serves as the bridge between the two worlds, literally and metaphorically.
I relied on journaling to harness the rapid internal iterative process. Using the stream of consciousness style of writing as raw materials, I attempt to answer the many questions I asked myself.
Read The Internal Monologue of a Millennial Immigrant here → Parallel Publication
