The 19-year-old American drama "Excitement" has recently set off a new wave of enthusiasm on major domestic platforms, and various makeup and eye makeup tutorials have emerged in an endless stream.
dy blogger @ sure enough
Blue-purple colorful eyeshadow with large sequins and gold leaf fragments, in the same color of the mysterious light, it seems to sprinkle a brilliant galaxy on the eyes.
dy blogger @ Ouyang Xiaozhi
The inspiration for this imitation makeup comes mainly from the second female Jules in the play.
A gold powder gradient mermaid hair color, all kinds of exaggerated blingbling flash makeup, just like this transgender character who likes to wear a checkered pleated skirt to watch the japanese manga itself, there is a maverick weird dream.
Along with this makeup, there is also the intoxicated, crazy, indulgent, and decadent adolescence in the play.
Childhood shadows, adolescent trauma, drug addiction, violence, alcohol, LGBT... This 19-forbidden youth drama vividly interprets the aesthetics of psychedelic stream-of-consciousness through the light and shadow movement mirror full of strong visual impact and the avant-garde jumping and somber electronic soundtrack.
But the real psychedelic aesthetics is far more than that, the essence of psychedelic aesthetics is to transcend the conventional space-time boundaries and behavioral logic to show the various strange fantasies of the inner world.
Abstract, weird, gloomy, depressed, confused, obscure, apocalyptic sadness, niche rebellion... None of these words are sufficient to fully describe this aesthetic feature.
The essence of psychedelic aesthetics is not so much to create a dream, to concretely describe people's hallucinations, dreams, imaginations, and feelings.
Today, let's take a look at what this aesthetic experience of "sucking people in" is.
01
The Past and Present Lives of Psychedelic Aesthetics: The Source of Illusion
Psychedelic aesthetics come in many forms, from literal language to visual art, film, anime, to auditory rock electronic music, as well as various illustrations, posters, fashion, underground clubs, art exhibitions, experimental short films and so on.
The Art Nouveau movement at the end of the 19th century opened the first cracks in psychedelic aesthetics.
The Czech painter Mucha used flowing curves to construct the shapes, hair and costumes of the Chinese people, and the different curves were combined and intertwined, guiding the audience's eyes to chase the infinite possibilities in the painting.
Beauty people always present a slightly drunken state, with a lazy posture, a delicate look, and flushed cheeks, as if drunk.
Abstract plant patterns and high-purity geometric pattern colors add to the feminine and mysterious beauty of the paintings.
Top: Mucha, Bottom: Magic Card Maiden Sakura, Mucha's painting style strongly influenced Japanese girl manga
If Mucha's paintings and beauties brought about a classical primary intoxication, then half a century later, when World War II gradually subsided, psychedelic art entered an unprecedented grand situation in the hands of the "Beat Generation"—the arrival of the hippie movement.
Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel On the Road, about a group of idle young people crossing the continental United States in an almost wandering fashion.
Jack Kerouac
"On the Road"
This deviant attitude towards life and a murky way of life is the norm for most hippies.
The hippie movement that rose in the 1960s and reached its peak in the 1970s was a rebellious movement of young Americans who despised moral traditions and deliberately turned away from mainstream society, as well as a rebellion against traditional culture, art, spirit, life, and all aspects.
They embraced freedom, drugs, alcohol, sex, and Far Eastern religions, and the recently invented hallucinogen LSD became popular, and both Lennon and Jobs were super fans of the psychedelic chemical.
LSD, diethylamide lysergic acid, a strong semi-artificial hallucinogen, flower name stamp
When hallucinogens entered the realm of artistic creation, hallucinogenic visual arts and psychedelic rock were born.
Psychedelic art refers to the visual art created by artists who give hallucinations after taking hallucinogens (LSDs) and are inspired by these hallucinations.
Hallucinogenic works of art usually have high-brightness contrasting colors, abstract fantasy and various strange spots of light, similar to the hallucinatory experience produced by drug use.
Works by Peruvian artist Pablo Amaringo
Also produced by hallucinogens is psychedelic rock, which strives to render a dreamlike feeling in music, creating a batch of music with strange beauty in an unconventional way.
The Beatles, Gratitude to Death and Jefferson Airplane are among the representatives.
Three bands
With the California government declaring LSD an illegal drug, the hippie movement in San Francisco as its birthplace also gradually declined, and the psychedelic aesthetic brought by hallucinogens was temporarily suspended, but the white-hot cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union created another psychedelic aesthetic.
In 1983, the American writer Bruce Bask published Cyberpunk, the first to propose the term Cyberpunk synthesized by "Cybernetics" and "Punk".
From science fiction to science fiction films, cyberpunk usually revolves around elements such as hacking, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and large interest groups, depicting the proposition between a highly developed technological civilization and a small human individual under a dystopian tragic colorist society.
Blade Runner (1982).
Blade Runner 2049 2017
In the decade after the millennium, the vaporwave art of the steam wave, heavily influenced by cyberpunk, emerged.
Steamwave is a genre of electronic music that emerged around 2010 and developed into a genre that included installation art, collage art, video games, commercials, movies... Artistic movements in various fields.
Spanish Film "Skin"
The beauty of the steam wave is like pink foam, dense, illusory, viscous, and the vivid colors and blurry picture quality together depict a drunken, crumbling aesthetic experience.
02
The respective evolution of psychedelic aesthetics in the East and the West
The different types of psychedelic aesthetics have some important common elements:
For example, high-saturation, high-contrast colors.
The bright, dizzying color combinations of hallucinogenic art, reddish-blue neon hues of cyberpunk, baby pink and dreamy purple of steam waves all strive to reach a level of beauty that makes people's eyes "flutter".
The spiraling and intricate geometric patterns present a visual experience similar to that of hallucinogen smokers.
The ambiguous neon lights reflect the eerie consciousness and the ambiguous and sultry mood.
In the East and the West, the psychedelic aesthetics rooted in the soil of different cultures have different aesthetic characteristics.
1. Psychedelic aesthetics in the East: more emotional expression
Psychedelic aesthetics have two major bases in the East: Hong Kong and Japan.
The representative of Hong Kong is Wong Kar-wai, and in his films, color and light have long transcended the level of visual impact and become a symbolic and self-conscious aesthetic choice.
The red, blue and black tones of Carmen Mong Kok symbolize violence and gore.
The red and green light and shadow of "Chongqing Forest" contrast between cold and warm colors symbolize the ambiguous feelings of the fringe characters in the counter-mainstream, as well as the contradictions and struggles in the emotions.
The dark red of "Fancy Years" renders a hazy mood that looms and elusively appears between the two.
But in terms of psychedelic aesthetics, Japan's export is the most successful among Asian countries.
There is a slightly pejorative slang term in the English vocabulary called Weeaboo, which refers to the Japanese people in white society who are avidly in love with everything about Japanese culture, especially the anime elements that are exported. (Similar to the domestic term "dipterocarpus")
In "Excitement", Jules refused the invitation of the heroine because she had to rush home to watch "Magical Girl Circle".
During the Art Nouveau period, the West was already influenced by Eastern styles in its decoration, especially in the Edo period of Japan and ukiyo-e.
Japan's modern neon aesthetic also profoundly influences the Western perspective.
The sci-fi manga Ghost in the Shell, created by Masamune Shiro and hailed as a cyberpunk classic, was adapted by Paramount Pictures into a live-action film with a large number of stars, but unfortunately, this highly invested work has a general reputation and a huge disparity with the local animation adapted by Oshii Mori.
Gao Zan's short comments point out the main points, because Oshii Mori pays more attention to the contradictions and pains that people suffer as individuals, rather than the showmanship mode that stays on the surface.
Japan's native psychedelic aesthetics are also composed of Toshi Imatoshi, Kusama Yayoi, Shikazu Kawa, Takashi Murakami and others, whose psychedelic artistic creations also highlight strong subjective emotions.
Yayoi Kusama and works
2. Psychedelic aesthetics in the West: more psychoanalytic
From the 1950s when the craze for stream-of-consciousness cinema was the masterpiece "Wild Strawberries" to the ultimate brain-burning work "Mulholland Road" at the beginning of the century, psychedelic aesthetics in the West is obsessed with exploring the spiritual construction between dream and reality.
In Bergman's Wild Strawberries, the 80-year-old protagonist sees a clock without hands, a face without facial features, blood-dripping eyes, and himself lying in a coffin in a dream.
All the strange illusions point to loneliness and death, and the interweaving of dreams, memories and hallucinations finally makes the old man who is coming to the end of his life realize the remaining unbearable in his past life and realize his spiritual salvation.
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is still being interpreted to this day in a variety of ways.
Some say it's an illusion of a schizophrenic, and the protagonist Diana repeatedly wanders between reality and nightmares, constantly validating Freud's psychoanalysis of the "id," "self," and "superego."
03
Behind the psychedelic aesthetic is the screaming youth culture
An aesthetic phenomenon that has swept through all aspects of society must be inseparable from the historical background and social culture of a certain stage.
Young people of different eras have different human life propositions.
The psychedelic wave that began in the 1960s was the chaos and confusion born of the anti-war wave and the baby boom, and young people paralyzed themselves with psychedelics, alcohol, and rock and roll.
Forrest Gump Jenny is also a hippie
After the millennium, LGBT and various mental dilemmas have trapped a new generation of young people, with nowhere to digest the hurt and agitated hormones mixed with decadent and broken lives.
Through strange visual presentation, confused emotional power and abstract imagination, psychedelic aesthetics pinned on people's hot and rebellious spiritual connotations.
From the Art Nouveau style of the late 19th century, to the psychedelic art of the 1960s, to today's youth subculture 60 years later, the whole world has undergone rapid changes, but what has not changed is people's perception and expression of the world's great changes.
Pop art master Peter Marx reinvented The Lady of Liberty
More than one generation is considered to be the "Beat Generation", but it is these Beat generations that have created thoughts and achievements that cannot be ignored in the history of art, literature and even science and technology.
Like Hunter Schafer, the actor of Jules in "Excitement", she is also a transgender person in reality, who loves psychedelic art and has always insisted on advocating for LGBT rights.
One of the scenes I really like is when the girls in the play ride their bicycles and laugh recklessly and rush forward, like a white deer desperately facing the first rays of morning light.
More understanding of the hot and chaotic youth, more understanding of the painful rebellious individual, allowing them to endure layers of pain to peel off the hard shell to reveal, chase and embrace their true selves.
And this is the highest desire of all psychedelic aesthetics.