Reading Response #1

The Inside Out project aims to “transform messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work”, where the approach is to simply upload a black and white portrait of yourself with a statement that entails your overall beliefs and what you stand for. The artist behind this project, JR, is a self-proclaimed “artivist” (artist and activist) who pushes boundaries through illegally posting these portraits around poor and corrupt areas around the world. Rather than draw all the attention to the aesthetic appeal of his photos, he focuses on giving the people displayed on the portrait a bigger voice that can be exhibited around certain places. A particular project within Inside Out that caught my eye was the “Taiwan, keep it up!” project, where a collage of portraits are used to form  Chinese characters translated into “Taiwan, keep it up!”. Not only does the formation of the characters add an aesthetic appeal to the work, but rather it delivers a crucial message for the people of Taiwan to keep their heads high despite their political disputes against China. On the other hand, I feel like the assembly of all the portraits into one Chinese phrase details the various people of Taiwan who want to express the same message. Another project that also intrigued me was the “Inside Out 11M” project, which displayed the portraits of immigrants and their descendants. The title “11M” is named after the debate regarding the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and this project is aimed to address immigration and how this country was developed by immigrants.