Yuchen L DESMA 9

      The most impressive message I got from this week’s lesson is how closely medical technology and art can connect with each other. Previously I rather thought that anatomy is an area relevant only to medical sciences and physicians. I had a hunch that anatomy could also be important to artists who want to draw human bodies accurately but did not know how the connection between art and medical sciences can go any further. However, as professor Vesna has pointed out in her lecture, scanning and taking pictures of human bodies in works such as the Visible Human Project also inspire artists by enabling them to view body structures directly. Artists can then wonder how different muscles cooperate to enable complex movement, how our brains generate thoughts, and many other thought-provoking questions. A picture from the Visible Human Project Other projects like Human Genome Project and Human Microbiome Project all provide exciting insight into different aspects of human bod

       On April 11 2017, I went to Youjin Chung’s solo exhibition at the Broad Art Center. The exhibition is called Dead Wood, “Useless, for use.” The first thing that attracted my attention upon  my entrance to the exhibition was a structure with mechanical parts that can move and three lamps illuminating the structure from different angles. As the mechanical parts moved, the shadow casted on the wall also changed. I was totally fascinated by not only the mechanical parts, but their shadow. Watching the mechanical parts move regularly and their shadow changing with that movement in a way that can be calculated through geometry and optics, I was reminded of unit 2’s lecture which discusses the connection between math and art. Although I could not tell what exact sequence the mechanical parts moved in, I knew instinctively that they were programmed by mathematically arranging which part moves for how long and which part moves next. The lamps also seemed to be posed at caref