Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2022 - Student interview - 03. Jocelyn Lim

JOCELYN LIM: Hi, my name is Jocelyn Lim and I studied visual arts at Marsden High School. My body of work is sort of a study on faith and free will and the way you can cleave it together but ultimately you can also create chaos when not put together properly. In a Macroverse perspective, it represents the political climate. People in power tend to abuse and become corrupted by power.

My artwork depicts 5-- well, more prominently, 4 major characters. There are stuffed animals of a rabbit, a fox, a bear and a puppy. The puppy had these water tank ears and water tank tail. And they were filled with this black mucky liquid that sort of represented human misery. And in certain cards where situations were more dire or helpless then the tanks would fill more and more.

And it just makes this very clear statement of suffering and being under someone else's control. Now, the reason I broke it down to, like, from 5 to 4 is because one is sort of more passive in terms of existence, the Joker card, that is. The Joker card is a cheetah which is sort of just a play on words with the word 'cheetah' and 'cheater'. And the cheetah is, essentially, the one in control of all of these creatures.

You'll see that the first card in the deck would be the cheetah holding strings with the puppets of the little plush animals and then the last card would be him in human form where he would be raising out his hand to you. Sort of inviting you to let him into your mind, to let him control you the way he controls these other characters.

The main artist's inspiration that I had was Pamela Colman Smith, who is the illustrator of the traditional Rider-Waite tarot card deck. I think it's one of the most popular tarot card decks out there. And I think most tarot card decks route from her work. Now, similarly, my title, 'XXI', is a direct sort of allusion to the tarot card, The World, which is 21st on the major arcana set.

Now, The World represents cycle change movement but also the structures that create the world we exist in. The colour scheme of my cards is, essentially, a bold flash of a certain almost neon colour. For example, the bunny suit would have-- suite, sorry, would have blue, bright cyan blue and it's complemented with black and white which is a little harsh, but I think it creates this sense of duality and balance.

And, at the same time, there's also a sort of chaotic value to it. It sort of, quite literally, is just the metaphor for control and power and how imbalance can create a disturbance. Cards, in the symbolistic sense, was created based on social hierarchy. We have the King, the Queen, and Jack, who are like the upper class and 1 to 10, which would be just commoners and lower-class people.

Now, that quite literally alludes to the political climate and how there are more commoners-- the majority are commoners, and the minority are the people in power and yet the people in power still abuse this power instead of helping the majority and giving them the equal benefit that they should receive.

And you'll see a lot of hints of them like a sort of narrative almost with all the characters throughout each suite. So, for this work, I wanted my canvas to be fairly large and initially, I worked with some sort of amateur free app, ibis Paint X, which is pretty good in itself but the limiting issue is that it has really small canvases. So, I needed to move to Clip Studio Paint, which is, I guess, more professional but like equally user friendly app.

And with that one, I was allowed to get bigger canvases. While I was conceptualising, I think, what I did was I would open up a small canvas and I would do very simple silhouette sketches of ideas of how I wanted to place my figures and how I wanted to depict certain things with different symbols and different metaphors.

And then when I'm satisfied with that, I'll move on to a proper canvas and start sketching and lining. I am currently studying a bachelor in fine arts in UNSW and I intend to go further into character design and comic making because I enjoy things like manga and anime and sort of that beautiful cartoonic style. And I would like my work to, similarly like 'XXI', to contain the meaning and symbolistic value until the end of my art career, I suppose.

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