Art Director | Advertising Creative
Art Director | Advertising Creative
Social Media Incense Packs is a collection of speculative objects that aims to respond to how social media has become so engrained in our everyday lives. Social Media is an inescapable entity due to its convenience of allowing us to stay connected with loved ones which may be far away. But what role will social media play once our loved ones pass away? Will social media play a role in paying our respects for those that have been deceased? I sought to physically represent the notion of ‘paying respects to the deceased’ through form, materiality and representation. More specifically, I wanted to question how my own cultural customs of ‘paying respects to the dead’ would be influenced by social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
In Chinese culture, a set of three incenses (Note: the number three is philosophically considered as a lucky number in Chinese culture) along with joss paper (In Chinese this term is literally translated as ‘gold paper’) is burnt as offerings to the deceased in order to ensure that they have good prospects in the afterlife. Nowadays, people have the option of buying joss paper as well items such as papier-mâché iPad’s, cars, cigarettes and even small scale houses to burn as offerings to the dead. Using traditional religious paraphernalia, I sought to reappropriate items such as incense and joss paper as though they were produced by Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Through the reappropriation of these items, it seeks to articulate how society continually feeds its ego through signs of appreciation such as ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ to fuel our narcissistic social media presence even when we pass away. Through the burning of these objects, it questions how much we value and idolise social media, the amount of 'likes' or 'followers' we receive and whether or not these speculative objects will be offered to the deceased in the near future.