In vast and crowded cities, we all walk alone. Everywhere we look, hard concrete seems to magnify the distance between one individual and the next. Human cities are emotional deserts.
Andiry Tan, a designer from Malaysia, creates colorful, digital collages from urban imagery, bringing feeling to the cold walls by adorning them with silhouettes of life. Tan first explored collages over a decade ago at Kuala Lumpur’s Dasein Academy of Art. He discovered a form that relies less on carefully planned composition than on letting the imagination roam free, a form where starting with a simple theme can yield unimagined results. Today Tan works as an associate creative director at an advertising agency in Shanghai, yet he still retains his passion for this art form. “Collage just means combining different elements into something new and interesting. It’s all about the possibilities of trying to piece something together.”
偌大的城市，我们都是孤独的行者。摩天高楼上那些空洞的窗，是留给孤独凝望，还是锁住了梦想的翅膀？环顾四壁，心与心的距离仿佛因为坚硬的混凝土而变得遥远。这里是人间的城市，却又是情感的荒漠。马来西亚设计师 Andiry Tan 将斑驳陆离的城市用数字的方式拼贴而出，冰冷的墙壁却因为 “生命剪影” 的点缀而变的饶有情绪。
Andiry 初次接触拼贴艺术已是十多年前，当时的他就读于达尔尚艺术学院（Dasein Academy of Art），他发现拼贴艺术需要充分发挥想像力，不太需要过于认真的具体构图，从主题出发的创作才衍生出意想不到的结果。 多年过去，Andiry 已在上海一家广告公司担任创意副总监，但他依然坚持对拼贴艺术的热爱，他说：“拼贴其实就是在不同的元素中，搭配出新的乐趣。一切都是尝试拼出的可能。”
City Collages, Tan’s sixth series, combines images of buildings from Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, Cannes, Kuala Lumpur, and other cities he’s visited. Despite the bright colors, a closer look reveals a darker note, like the silhouettes of children flying out of a window, or a figure in a business park staring moodily at the ground, as if he were making an ironic statement. “My style has always veered toward dark humor,” he says. “The thoughts behind it are actually all pretty grim.”
Tan tries to load his works with negative, hard-to-express emotions. Each piece is steeped in his mood or mental state at the time he made it. While working on Freedom, Tan was attending the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and was told he had to finish his submission within three days. “Despite my comfortable surroundings, I felt like my freedom had been snatched away by the competition,” he says. “I wanted to leap from the window, like the people in the collage.”
Negative feelings notwithstanding, Tan admits he’s an optimist at heart. The circular shapes in each piece allude to people facing problems with a steady mind. “Real-world feelings are tough, but things eventually pass, and everything works out in the end.”
《城市拼贴》是 Andiry 的第六个拼贴系列。在作品中，他拼贴出北京、上海、东京、首尔、戛纳、吉隆坡等不同城市的建筑剪影，这些都是 Andiry 曾造访的地方。虽然呈现的颜色鲜艳，但仔细看看，你会发现这些建筑背后承载着一些黑暗的思考，例如飞出窗外的孩子、办公区垂头走过的青年等等，都好像在讽刺着什么，他说：“我的作品风格一向偏于黑色幽默，背后的思考其实都是沉重的。”
Andiry 希望将内心难以抒发负面情绪融入在作品中，每一幅作品其实都渗透着他当时的心情和状态。在创作《Freedom》期间，Andiry 在法国戛纳参加广告节，并被告知要在三天之内完成参赛作品。他说：“与戛纳舒适的环境相比，我觉得自由被比赛绑架，才有了作品中人物从窗内一跃而出的渴望。”
不过，虽然带有一点内心的负面情绪，但 Andiry 承认自己依然是一个乐观主义者，每幅作品中的圆形图案，其实指人面对困难时平衡心态，“即使现实世界的情绪不会一直美好，但事情总就会过去，一切皆可圆满。”
Is frenetic urban life overwhelming or dazzling? This is the question posed by Tan’s City Collages series. Like a collage, our lives are stories made up of different people and objects. “The more a person experiences, the more the life they piece together upends their expectations. You’ve got to believe you can piece together a different kind of life,” says Tan. “Anything’s possible. It all depends on how much material you’ve got in your hands.”
面对城市压力，是不断低迷，还是拼出多彩？这是 Andiry 的《城市拼贴》系列作品带我们思考的问题。其实拼贴艺术和我们人生很相似，生活就是由不同的人和事物拼凑出的故事，“当一个人见识越多，拼贴出来的生活越颠覆原来的想象。要相信自己可以拼贴不一样的人生作品，一切皆有可能，一切都原由你手上的材料有多少。” Andiry 说。
