Image & TTOA TIEA
The image and TTOA TIEA are parts of the summative assessment for this unit – The Taste Of Apples Novel Study Unit. Throughout this unit, we, as a class, read through most of the short stories in Huang Chun-ming’s famous novel The Taste of Apples, annotated the stories, explored the tension within, and analyzed the author’s technique and impact on the audience in our practice TIEAs. For our summative, we explored the tensions that exist in our daily lives and captured them through photographs. The tensions we were asked to take pictures of are the themes that occurred in The Taste Of Apples, which include tension between rural and urban, tension between local and foreign, tension between generations, or tension between modern and traditional. Lastly, we wrote a TIEA about the visual tension we captured and one of the themes from the story, which is tension between modern and traditional for me. Shown below is my summative, enjoy! 🙂
In the image “Pressed by the Moderns,” Sunny Fang uses the contrast between the compact traditional temple and the modern buildings to showcase tension between traditional and modern, as done by Huang Chun-ming in the short story “The Drowning of the Old Cat.” In the story, villagers of Clear Spring Village strongly opposed to the townspeople’s plan on constructing a swimming pool next to Dragon’s Eye Well. They protested, “If we let the people in town get away with this, it’ll be the end of Clear Spring’s geography” (Huang 16). In the image, the traditional temple was forced to fit within the modern society as it portrays how the temple doesn’t have an incense censer in front of it, is relatively small-scale, and lies in between two modernized buildings (Fang). Fang shows a dramatic contrast in architecture style and size between the traditional temple and modern buildings in order to portray tension, similar to how Huang Chun-ming creates it between the swimming pool and the original Dragon’s Eye Well. In the photograph, the temple resides in between two relatively huge modern buildings, and part of the temple slightly collides with the sign of the building on the right. Also, unlike most traditional temples, the temple doesn’t place a censer in front of it due to the lack of space that is being occupied by the road. The difference in size and the disappearance of the incense censer are evident to how modernization has forced tradition to reform itself in a way that forces it to become befitting in the context. Even though the temple still exists, the rise of modern buildings forcibly places it under the pressure of eventually being eliminated by society, just like how the Dragon’s Eye Well would no longer be the same once the swimming pool was built. The tension between traditional and modern remains while the two co-exist because the emergence of modernization indicates how traditional is no longer mainstream, as shown in the intense proportional difference in the image.
Works Cited
Fang, Sunny, Nov. 11 2018., “Pressed by the Moderns.” [Photograph] (Sunny Fang’s own private collection).
Huang, Chun-ming. The Taste of Apples, translated by Howard Goldblatt, Columbia University Press, 2001.