_
茻mǎng
Branding: Chinese Ghost Festivals, Qing Ming & Funerals
茻mǎng is actually from Chinese Oracle bone script (甲骨文) which means “rank grass”. It has been simplify and becomes a Chinese radical 艹 (草字頭). This statement can be seen from the Chinese character 葬. 葬 means funeral in Chinese which is made from 茻 and 死 (death), 茻 is separated into top and bottom, and 死 is in the middle. Meaning that dead body is usually buried under the grass. 茻mǎng is the brand for three main Chinese ceremonies that require paper offerings which are funerals, Qing Ming Festival and Hungry Ghost Festival.
Since I'm a kid, I always wonder why Chinese people will burn paper offerings and paper made objects like house, car, phone etc. to the death, and how can they receive them? In this project, I have created 3 illustration spreads to represent the journey of how paper offerings reach to the death.
In the first spread, it shows incense sticks burning which means Chinese people burning paper offerings, Then in second spread, the paper offerings will pass by a NaiHe Bridge which leads to the afterlife. In last spread, it shows the underworld where the afterlife will receive their paper offerings from their alive families.
To make the project more interactive, I played around and applied Augmented Reality on the first spread, where I created paper offerings in 3D, and use an app called Augment to set the first spread as the Tracker. When users scan the Tracker, then the 3D paper offerings will pop out in users' phone screen. This idea came up is because we can't see the paper offerings after they're burned, and Augmented Reality is like a medium between the real world and the afterlife.
- Thank you for watching -
