PROJECT ROOM B

Tanyth Berkeley’s THESIS CLASS

FEATURING WORK BY:

Stephanie S. Anderson, Ziqi Li, Jingmian Si, Ke Tan, Saijun Teng, Tatiana Tu, Xiaojing Wang, Jeremy Wu, Qingzhi Xu, Wenyi Xu, Jiawen Yang, Quan Yuan, Hujia Zhang

STUDENT REPRESENTATIVES:

Jeremy Wu and Quan Yuan

Beyond the Finishing Line

The good thing about my students being subject to international covid conditions is that I know when they make it through, when they graduate they will always have the knowledge of having walked through fire and they have done so exceptionally. My class, unlike the other graduating classes this year, spent the first half of their senior year learning remotely. Only five returned to in-person classes in the Spring of 2022 leaving eight of the thirteen still at home or far flung, coming to me through the ether every Tuesday night. All together they are twelve wonderful young women and one wonderful young man. Keep this in mind cyberwalking viewer while you meander through our cyberspace each student has run an ultramarathon called “Thesis” to get to you.

It was Jingmian who saw her hometown empty out and become abandoned and Qingzhi (Peyton) who valued the dust settling. It was Jiawen who submerged herself in diaphanous dreams and modernization and Ke whose escape fantasies got writ large as the red queen goddess looks down on us silly mortals. Ziqi imagined intimacy and filled her loneliness with beautiful surprises while Quan’s frustration entertained notions of burning it all down. Saijun oversaw her grandmother’s care and pondered the quality of the elder’s lives while Stephanie invoked her ancestors and spoke to them with her hands and channeled their spirits into a solid bronze Egyptian deity she cast herself.

In New York City Xiaojing (Caroline) continued the saturated dreams she had in China that questioned our reality while Hujia poured over her photographs made on a Chinese river and the fisherman she met there in the moonlight. It was Wenyi who contemplated the architecture of a distant past in balance with the natural world while Jeremy (Jianwei) tapped into people’s deepest desires on the internet. Yenan (Tatiana) , always inventing, experimented here with the digital space itself, abstraction, and the image and metaphor of dogs running free.

I feel lucky and grateful the stars aligned just right to allow us to connect with each other and to find meaning through creating when it was needed most.

—Tanyth Berkeley