Trace Language·Skin Sense Narrative

Jinlin Peng
Guanghui Huang
Bachelor of Arts in Art Design(Visual Communication Design)
Visual Communication Design
2025-02-10
Color
Empathetic Design | Book Design
Mixed medium
This project originated from a long-lasting dialogue with the body. As a patient with chronic allergies and eczema, I present a narrative experiment of skin allergies as a field of struggle from the first-person perspective. The pain and itchiness of chronic allergies and eczema are not only physiological reactions, but also physical manifestations of psychological states. The scratches of people with eczema stay on the skin longer than those of healthy people. I think these marks become time scales engraved on the body. The changing texture that spreads over time is both a pathological mark and a medal of physical struggle. My graduation project also hopes to break the cognitive barrier with visual synaesthesia, so that the hidden pain of people with chronic eczema and allergies can be seen.
  • Trace records (partial) I chose to use myself as the recording medium, and through months of photography + hand-drawn translation, I have established a visual scratch library of multiple sets of traces. Dual recording system: · Take close-ups of the most severely affected area every day or every few days to establish an objective image archive · Use markers to create secondary works on photos on Canson paper, and record the painful scratches of the day through the changes in pen pressure and scratch depth.
  • Trace language extraction (partial） The boundaries of erythema and itching are transformed into linear language, and the scratches are formed into dense lines through cross-strokes. Just like Kenya Hara’s concept of “making known things unfamiliar”, I deliberately magnified the abnormal beauty of eczema marks and scratches - the erythema is transformed into organic lines through the fluid brushstrokes of the marker, and the disorder of the scratches is repeatedly arranged to form traumatic graphic patterns.
  • Exhibition View Using the scratches caused by skin allergies as a language, the disordered scratches when scratching the visual itch are transformed into rhythmic abstract graphics. A design with a sense of life, this reshaping of pathological traces is actually also a hope to practice the "Without Thought" design philosophy advocated by Naoto Fukasawa. When the viewer unconsciously sees the marks on the pages or touches the bumps and grooves of turning pages, the body memory will spontaneously connect to the perceptual experience of skin itching and pain.