124 + 625 Roman Columns

2019

124 + 625 Roman Columns is a sarcastic, poetic multimedia archive of “Chinese roman columns”.

The Greeks developed the classical orders of architecture, which are most easily distinguished by the form of the column. The Romans suited them to their tastes and architectural liking. In modern time, this architectural element promotes a rich, ideal and noble style. Carrying this connotation, roman columns are used in a lot of situations in China: from a permanent construction in a fancy real estate, to a temporary decoration in a wedding, and to a newly built house in countryside…

Because of a large amount of needs, Chinese producers have always been busy with roman columns. There are numerous different kinds of roman columns being sold on taobao.com — columns made of plasters, plastic, concrete, rubber and column’s moulds…

This work is an interactive archive of Chinese roman columns. I collected 124 roman columns in Beijing, by capturing them with my camera, and 625 roman columns’ images from taobao.com, by scraping the data from the web shops and integrating them into a self-growing system.

The installation consists the the film “124 Roman Columns”, the interactive website of 625 roman columns and the printed version of the 625 columns. The film has 3 chapters: ORDER, IDEALISM and VICTORY, which respectively show the columns, sculptures and triumphal scenes in the architectures in Beijing.

group exhibition Contemporary Flavours @KABK

framework

work developed in the class Coding taught by Martijn de Heer