The project "Life after life" aims to trigger people's thinking about death. Life is full of uncertainties, and no one knows when death will come. Albert Camus said, "There is only one really serious philosophical problem." If life must experience "death," how do we enrich our limited time? The world today is still filled with conflicts, wars, and sorrows... How do we handle our relationship with death? Discussions about death always seem to be laden with unnameable emotions. Albert Camus wrote in The Stranger, "For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world." Driven by these contexts and inspirations, we have produced a project that explores how we can offer comfort to the living.
The project begins with the death of an imaginary character and creates a character archive in a solemn drawing style. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry described death in The Little Prince this way: "'You understand. It's too far. I can't take this body with me. It's too heavy,' I said nothing. 'But it will be like an old abandoned shell. There's nothing sad about an old shell...'" This text provides us with emotionally rich imagery, and the visual design of our project is inspired by this, creating emotionally resonant images. We work backwards from the character’s death to the character’s mystery, advancing the story with flashbacks and framing the story from one scene to another, such as scenes and objects, thus prompting people to think about death.
The specific output of the project is a physical book in which visual effects are designed to build images with a combination of hand-drawing, collage, and text. The whole story unfolds like the discovery of a stranger's forgotten world, revealing moods not commonly experienced on a normal day. It recreates and explores corners of the world that may be common around us but are at the same time hidden, and it uncovers the clues to the characters' deaths.
