"I am..."
Chess design against stereotype
Everyone has their own character.
With a long history, each chess pieces has been assigned to certain label or category without much thought, which is the same in the society nowadays. I’d like to weaken such symbolic shapes in my design, in which each chess pieces has its own shape reflecting its own character. To emphasize the characteristics of each chess pieces, they are designed in totally different shapes based on six Chinese Idioms. For instance, the Queen, instead of appearing as a tiara, is designed to express the morbidezza and strength of woman. I hope that this set of chess can reveal our conventional thinking pattern, and encourage people to reconsider the nature of people and objects.
The six Chinese Idioms:
// 外强中干 King
// 八面玲珑 Queen
// 直行无忌 Rook
// 风谲云诡 Bishop
// 眼观四处 Knight
// 越甲三千 Pawn
Stereotypes: an oversimplified image of a type of people or thing.
There's a constant push for women to be pretty, proper, compliant while for men to be masculine. Why are we using it?
Looking past the stereotypes can help me focus on myself rather than others, and express my real feeling rather than focus on pleasing the social constructs pushed upon me. I would hope that this being the 21st century, we would have learned by now that we are so much more than our stereotypes.
At the begining, I got the inspiration from the Queen, of which I found history fascinating. Originally, the Queen was an image of male general and it was replaced by the image of women because of the rising of feminism during the revolution of bourgeois of France. As the only female role, the Queen has the strongest flexibility and aggression. She can move any amount of spaces forwards, backwards, and side to side and diagonally. She is elegant and tenacious.
