Sharon Hu

Python-2050

The great folk tales of China tell us that all things may grow and change. While a stone may become a plant, and an animal may become a man, a snake may as well become a woman in the Legend of the White Snake, which was a Chinese legend first published in 1624 by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1646) in his Stories to Caution the World (Jingshi tongyan 警世通言). (Internet Archive) Inspired by the Japanese futurist manga Ghost in the Shell (攻殼機動隊), and the Sci-fi Anime Akira (アキラ), my thesis project revolves around the theme of futuristic storytelling with the practice of a time-honoured textile-making technique, felting – narrating a new version of the Legend of the White Snake that happens in the future of the year 2050.

“Python-2050 once lived a life as a white snake spirit where she fell in love with a human. The man also fell in love with her, but they never got to be together because the world could not tolerate the love between two different species. The white snake bravely fought for her true love until death. Thousands of years later, in the year 2050, the white snake was reborn as a humanoid bionic snake robot, which is considered a female. Just as she thought that she could finally chase for love, she found out a sad truth – her lover was also brought back to life, yet as a normal human being. Even though Python-2050 is now a lady robot, the world is just as same as it was thousands of years ago for not allowing cross-species love. Against the so-called social moral, Python-2050 decides to fight again. How will the story end this time? The inspiration for this story came from the reality of our world – no matter how economics, education and technologies have developed during these past few decades, some old, feudal ideas are still affecting the LGBTQ community today, hindering them from being whoever they want to be, and loving whoever they want to love. Through the story of Python-2050, I am also expecting the day when true freedom and understanding finally come. To bring the story to life, I am using the felting technique. Felt is a material with a long history of having been used to make a variety of things since ancient times, including clothing, crafts, and industrial products. In the late nineteenth century, figures made of felt first appeared in stage performances, which immediately arouse people’s interest and became extremely popular in many different applications. (Stranger Things Wiki) Chose needle felting, a traditional technique still popular today, to create futuristic artwork. Starting with the tufting technique as an experiment, I used metal wire and wool as the materials. Although tufting allowed me to achieve the effect like a relief sculpture, which I preferred for telling the story. However, during the process, I found felting allows me to create realistic characters and scenes with a three-dimensional depiction. Also, characters could have movements and interactions with felting, which creates a greater potential for my work. In some way, my design is quite similar to a garage kit. Ever since the development of cartoon and anime culture in contemporary time, garage kit has become an important part of comic-related peripheral products. Even though most of the garage kits in the market today are uniformly designed and mass-produced by big companies, anime fans and collectors are still crazy about owning them. A few artists also hand-make garage kits or transform market-sold garage kits into a unique look for custom orders. Overall, the materials of a garage kit are usually PVC, clay, resin, and other materials; there are very few designers who still use wool to make hand-made objects since wool is a unique material that is difficult to work within creating templated or standard-looking goods. Therefore, using wool adds to the uniqueness of the artwork, which also triggers collectors’ desire for adding the work to their collection. Another great quality of wool is the softness also increases the playability of the garage kit. With moveable body parts, a woollen garage kit will present a much more playful texture than plastic materials. ”