In this project, I took a step back to investigate the meaning of “consumption” and “consumerism” from the consumer’s perspective. Dictionary says that consume is to destroy; to eat up or drink up; or to spend wastefully. I have also interviewed people asking them what is consume means to them. Apparently, consume means differently to different people. In my interviews with my friends, the most common words they use to describe what consume means to them are stress relief, guilt, impulse, satisfaction. However, we all forget that the most basic consumption is to live and to sustain life. And it seems like we are consuming more than we should. So, what is consume? And why we consume in such manner?
In the meantime, I was also interested in the Chinese language and culture and how it is related and portrays consume or consumption. Chinese characters are pictogram language. Here the character 贝 means shell and in the ancient time, shell was used as currency so the character contains it are mostly related to money, treasures or trade commodities. There are 73 Chinese characters that contains the shell now. The character 金 which means gold is another character that are often related to consumption and metal. Here I layered all the characters that have the same component and tries to investigate how the Chinese characters portrays consumption.
I have also visualized what consumption means through collage base on my own understanding.
In my final outcome, I combined all the former practices and created a book that achieved and visualized different form of consume. This book has two ways of reading it, fold and unfold. The foldings are intended to create an interaction with the readers so when reading the book, it is also a process of exploring for the reader at the same time I want the reader to also think about what is consume to you while reading the book. By using Chinese character on the side, I also want to challenge and explore the pictogram language and how it is being presented and understand by none Chinese speakers. After creating this book, I continued my study of consumption. David Graeber’s study of consumption share the same idea as mine which he believed that the chase of material goods has overtaken all other parts of social life, trapping people on a quest of desire that seeks to fulfill human vanity. However, he also investigated the merchant side of consumerism that helps the society to grow which is a new path that I can explore in my future studies. Now that I’m asking myself: Is consumption good or bad? What consumerism indicates about our attitudes toward ownership, desire, and social connections? How much consumption is too much, are we greedy for consuming too much, or should we consume as much as we can?