For this assignment, I was asked to take a photo of a common everyday object and then manipulate the colors to tell a different kind of story. I chose a piece of wall art that hangs in my home. It’s this print of koi fishes swimming among the rocks and autumn leaves, art that I pass by almost every day without really thinking about it. That’s kind of the point I guess. Wall art is one of those things that fades into the background once it’s been hanging long enough. It’s become part of routine, almost invisible. But once I started paying attention to it, it didn’t feel invisible anymore. It felt like something that had more to say, especially when I began to shift the color palette. By choosing this object, I wanted to see if something quiet and ordinary could take on a new meaning, perhaps hinting at something deeper hiding beneath the surface.
At first glance, it just looks like a colorful, slightly surreal painting of koi fish and floating leaves. Something you’d expect to see hanging in a hallway or maybe a living room. That’s why I chose it. Wall art is one of those everyday objects most people stop noticing after a while. But I thought maybe if I shifted its colors, giving it some artificial edits, it could take on a new meaning. I wasn’t trying to make it loud and drastic or anything. Just… unsettling enough to make someone pause.
After messing around with the colors, the koi don’t really look alive anymore. Their purples and icy blues kind of make them feel unnatural, like they’ve been touched by something they weren’t supposed to. And the leaves too. They used to feel calm. Now they’re green and shadowed in a weird way, not natural at all. It’s like they’re fluorescent or maybe like they’ve absorbed something from the water that changed them. If you look closer at the cracks in the rocks, there’s dirt building up in them. I didn’t add that part. It was already there. But after changing the tones, it suddenly stood out more, like the pollution wasn’t just color… like it was hiding in the texture all along.
I guess that’s what I wanted to say with this, that pollution doesn’t always make itself loud and clear. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes it’s already there, just beneath the surface, and we don’t notice because we’ve gotten used to how things look. But color has this way of shifting the story. And even something as ordinary as a painting on a wall can hold a different meaning if we’re willing to look twice. I also started thinking about what koi fish usually symbolize, things like perseverance, transformation, and resilience. I found this article that looks at how koi show up in Chinese and Japanese art and culture and it helped me see the contrast between their usual meaning and how I reinterpreted them here. It kind of deepened the message with how even symbols of strength can be slowly altered by their surroundings, especially when something harmful goes unnoticed for too long.
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