Ziqi Cheng

The neighborhood I chose is the lower East Side Of Manhattan. My story is named The Stone Family inspired by the fishing people who live in government-donated houses after they retired and fishing become their leisure activity in the John V. Lindsay East River Park. I intended to create a black fairy tale in which people all become stones in the end, which transfer the message that human need to be truthful and respect nature and also expose the greed, dishonesty, and selfishness of human being. I appreciate my creative plots and the form of my story which is playful with risk-taking. My artist’s book has two parts, the one is the painting of the stones which shows the visual element in my story including, fish, ocean waves, and houses which are contained in a cylindershaped black and white box. The other part is an accordion book with stone collages that visualize different family structures and relationships between members, for example, nuclear families, single-parent families, extended families, childless families, grandparents families, and so on; each stone symbolizes one person. I build a bridge for the story from the Seminar and the artist book from Studio successfully.