This is an identity project I did back in university when I took the Design and Culture class. The brief was to make a kind of “scrap book” all about yourself: your identity, family, culture and ethnicity, religion, and even your worldwide view about emerging topics such as racism, gender equality, and more. We were truly given a full freedom in exploring the design, as we were encouraged to make it very personal in order to embrace our own identities.

In order to achieve that level of accuracy, especially when talking about family history, I decided to make exact replicas of some family documents such as my mother’s birth announcement that was on the 1964 newspaper, hospital bill when my mother was born, and even a full-scale replica of an old prophecy paper made by a Chinese predictor that contains a, well, prophecy, about my mother’s big events in her life including her death date (fortunately we can’t read them since it was written in Chinese characters, and we are not intended to, thank you very much). It was very hard to find existing paper artefacts of my family since they were once moved from one house to another including experienced a flood that sadly took many precious documents. 

I decided to apply such treatment for other topics. I made some “zines” with different bindings and sizes to cover the area of religion, gender, and ethnicity. Then I made several artefacts that is related to the topics, such as a piece of fake newspaper to highlight the gender equality problem, and put it in the zines in order to make it look like a real documents, just like my family paper artefact replicas.

All the zines, documents, paper artefacts, map, and photos were then compiled into one “scrap book”.

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