Devanshi Shah: East Influences West
Posted in: UncategorizedThe 100 Days Project is originally a workshop held by Michael Bierut at the Yale School of Art that entails performing a creative operation that you’re capable of repeating every day. Taking inspiration from this, Debbie Millman, conducts this exercise each year with her class at School of Visual Arts. As an Indian student pursuing my Masters in Branding in USA, I always felt that the western world has always undermined the abilities of the eastern world. In fact whatever information they have about India is through Bollywood movies like slumdog millionaire. We are still the poor land of elephants and snakes.
The purpose of my project was to bring about the stories of the east – the discoveries and inventions in the field of science, art, culture, food, stories, language to the forefront. So many things that are now “American” are actually not from America. This led to ‘East Influences West’ on instagram where I illustrated and animated things that are from the Eastern countries like India, China, Japan, Persia etc.
My process was simple. I made a list of things, inventions that I knew were from India, my Asian friends from Japan, China and Korea in class helped me with what they knew and I started making small jpeg artworks and gifs each day. The difficult part was to visualize the things – for eg. how do you show smelting iron technology or sugar or sheep. This led to the development of black and white small animations that I created with the help of photoshop and illustrator. For more complex things like food, I took to google for images and eventually created artworks out of that.
The project was well received by people from all over the world. I would receive instagram messages from people that they didn’t know this particular thing was from the East! Who knew the series named after fibonacci was actually not by him or that beer was from Egypt. The entire project required a lot of research to make sure that yes this thing is from this place – as I was talking about history. Sometimes I got different viewpoints from different sources, but at the end I would illustrate choosing the most reliable source.
My project was eventually chosen to be presented at Master in Branding, SVA thesis presentation. This project was dear to me as I really wanted to bring up my country to the forefront, I am a proud Indian, and this project brought me closer to my country. It wasn’t about the number of likes on instagram but about knowledge that the Eastern world has been at par with the Western world. One thing, each day for 100 days.
Please let me know if you any more questions. Looking forward to hearing from you.
The link to my project is : https://www.instagram.com/eastinfluenceswest/
