Project Descriptions
Max Wierenga, Aidan Carrigan, and Lukas Kleinfeldt | Video Debate (YouTube)
Ding Village Debate — A Parody of 2020 Presidential Debates
In our project, we hope to relate the issues presented in the novel Dream of Ding Village to our current society. In our project, we emulate the 2020 presidential debates, with Ding Hui and Grandpa taking the stage instead of President Trump and Vice President Biden. The main focus of our debate is to highlight the significant ideological disagreements between Grandpa and Ding Hui. Aside from this, specific questions will be asked to both characters as a way to analyze their characters individually. Similar to the presidential debate, our debate will be divided into segments, each addressing a different issue involving both Grandpa and Ding Hui. The issues presented to the two characters would include Ding Hui’s business ventures (blood selling, coffin sales, and matchmaking), as well as their own family relationships. Finally, both characters will have to respond to a written statement authored by a villager whose family has been affected by both Ding Hui’s blood selling business, and the AIDs epidemic. We hope that our project will address broader themes while still highlighting just how different these two men are.
Kaia Heimstreet, Hannah Link, and Brooke Fair | Board Game (Google Presentation)
Bloodopoly — A Ding Village Board Game
We took the idea of the game Monopoly and made a Ding Village version, calling it Bloodopoly. We chose Monopoly to emphasize the business and greed in Ding Village. The game cards were used to talk about the themes and historical context, where people get punishments for not making enough money or not getting married. We used imagery and characterization in the game pieces and throughout the game board.
Angel Krejci | Collage & Explanatory Piece (Google Docs)
What They Truly Are
Throughout my piece I wanted to visually emphasize the themes within the novel and invoke strong emotions through this. The image as a whole is depicting the recurrent themes of greed and the dehumanization that comes from it. Every element of the piece was chosen with symbolic meaning behind it, yet all convey the same idea. My explanatory piece is to better clarify the collage and the significance of each element, as well as provide textual evidence that supports the element’s meaning.
Spencer Schmidt | Multimedia Artistic Representation (Google Presentation)
Envision Ding Village
My goal in this project was to create multiple pieces of artwork using various mediums to reflect imagery in the book Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke. Each piece of artwork contains the page(s) and quotes they were drawn from in a tag on the lower right corner of the piece. Some of the mediums used are acrylic paints and pencil sketches. I chose to use artwork to express the beauty and darkness and the balance between them.
Shannon Waters |Sculpture (Google Docs)
The Hanging Tree
While reading the book Dream Of Ding Village, one may notice the emphasis on the trees in the village. This sculpture represents the despair and death left upon the village. The tree is bare and made of wire. Each branch loops out for a gruesome representation of a noose. Many of the villagers surrendered their lives to disease. The two larger loops can correlate to the young lovers who lost their lives. The base of the tree reads “They died like falling leaves. Their light extinguished, gone from this world.” This was chosen as the base because it fit with the bare tree and idea of death. Along with this is the gravestone of the young lovers to go with their matching nooses.
Bronwyn Bond | Song (Google Drive)
R-E-D
I wrote lyrics reflecting the novel to the tune of L-O-V-E originally sung by Nat Cole King. I used the letters in the word “Red” to highlight the different implications of red throughout the book. Youthfulness, lust, blood, and death are some of the different ways the color can be interpreted; I split the lighter and darker meanings into two different verses. I sang the song as a lullaby to reference the narrator being a child, and to indicate peace in death.
Javaise Andersen | Sculpture and Explanation of Items (Google Drive)
Ding Hui’s coffins
The project I produced was a recreation of the mass produced coffins produced by the government in the novel. I scaled it down to an acceptable size and filled it with significant or symbolic items. I hoped to encapsulate the heavily symbolic, deeply thematic undertones the author so skillfully weaves into the text with items that relate to it directly. The full list of items as well as their explanations are linked above.
Lauren Winslow | Website
Dream of Ding Village Site
Since the internet is such a great place to share ideas I created a website for my project! My website includes multiple pages that the viewer can click through to linearly gain an understanding of the book. There is a specific tab for themes, paradoxes, and the historical context of the book. Another piece of my project is the red theme it follows. I picked the color red as the color scheme because it is the color of blood and a big symbol in the text. Combining all of these components onto one site will hopefully make learning about Yan Lianke’s exceptional work even more accessible.
Taylor Roughen and Molly FitzGibbon | Model (Google Drive)
The Red Coffin
To exemplify our interpretation of Dream of Ding Village, we built an opening coffin. Inside the coffin, we included elements of the story that assist in analyzing the changes in humanity after the blood boom hit. We included the boy’s grave to represent the cold murder that followed much suffering, tall grass to symbolize that affair between Uncle and Lingling, and a miniature schoolhouse with items being stolen out of it to show the loss of humanity and humility in Ding Village. In addition to this, there is an added edition relating to the drought as well as the will that Ding Liang wrote, as both resulted in strangely unusual conclusions.
The focus of the coffin is to demonstrate how the village fell apart after the blood boom. To prove this, we presented two separate themes in our project that cohere to form one project and main idea. We are demonstrating two concepts with our project; the ruination of society leads to the destruction of humanity and there are often more layers to a story to uncover than what meets the eye. The impact on society by this horrible business and the sickness that came with it will be symbolized on the outside of the coffin. The exterior demonstrates the original impact and the death of the entire town. To do this, we painted it red, just as the town was essentially painted red with blood. The inside of the coffin showcases different ways in which the village was affected and how those events impacted character traits and development, as well as the symbols that were given meaning after the disease began to spread. In our coffin, we featured the young narrator’s grave (painted gold to represent his family’s wealth), tall grass, the school house (painted yellow but stained with darker colors to exemplify the supposed happiness that should’ve been inside the building, but was destroyed), the Ding family house (painted green to symbolize greed), and a door with blank funeral scrolls to show how death wasn’t given a second thought after the disease took over the village. The inside of the box exhibiting these events and symbols illustrates that there is often more to a story than the eye can see, that tying back to one of our themes. Our project as a whole exemplifies that the ruination inside the village led to the downfall of many characters and the community as a whole.
Isabella Klug | Painting (Google Drive)
The Effect of Time on Ding Village
Throughout my painting, I chose to depict the story from the beginning to the end of Ding Village and the effect AIDS and blood selling had over time. The first house, on the left, includes red to represent blood selling and a two story house to show that money was prosperous allowing people to build bigger houses. The second house, in the middle, includes cut down trees to show all the wood that was needed for coffins, and it also includes scrolls for all of the funerals that had to be held. In the last house, on the left, it shows the crops being gone because of the drought, the houses ruined since everyone moved out of the village, and has gloomy colors to represent the emptiness of the town.
As a whole piece, this painting helps to show the negative effect that selling blood had during the AIDS epidemic. The village was seen as prosperous and wealthy during the beginning of the blood selling industry, but as time went on, many people died, and the village was never the same again.
Kaitlyn Hanson | An Analytical Poster (Google Presentation)
An Analyzation of the Dreams in Dream of Ding Village
This poster explores the hidden depth and meaning that exists within the dreams in Dream of Ding Village. Many of the dreams explore concepts like death and regret in both direct and indirect ways which are presented throughout this poster. The poster serves as an analytical essay displayed in a less organized manner. The body paragraphs are the clouds and the introduction and conclusion are the bed Grandpa lays on.
Travis Lawrence | Blendr 3D render (Google Presentation)
The Old Village
For this project I set out with the idea to create a virtual depiction of what I interpreted Ding Village to be. However, I ran into more than a couple hiccups. The first one, likely also the biggest, I had absolutely no idea how to use Blendr. I’d heard of it through some artists I follow and figured I’d give it a try. First I had to learn how to use Blendr, which took up most of my time, meaning I had to cut out the majority of content I wanted to include. The other problem was computational power. I have a fairly good pc, but the sheer amount of entities in this made renders of each frame take about five minutes. This made my plan to make a video of a tour through the village also highly impractical as the sheer amount of power and time needed for something like that would have been insane. The result of these cuts may not appear particularly impressive to most, but I am still quite proud of it.
Quentin Saylor | Cardboard Models (OneDrive)
Ding Village Through History
For my project, I chose to build three models of Ding Village at three points in the timeline of the novel: in the past, before the blood selling began, at the height of the blood selling boom, and at the end of the novel, after the effects of the blood selling and the AIDS epidemic had all but destroyed the village. The intent of my project is to use the changes that the village underwent throughout the course of the novel to show how the decisions made by the villages, and the motivations behind those decisions, eventually devastated their community and caused it to slowly wither and die along with its inhabitants.
Showing the village as it was before the blood selling, as an extremely poor farming village, helps to illustrate why the blood selling was adopted so eagerly by the villagers. Ding Village lived in poverty, as can be seen by the simple mud huts the villagers lived in, without anything even remotely resembling a luxury item. This poverty, and the lack of change, made the villagers all too willing to latch on to anything that had the possibility of improving their situation, without stopping to think about the long-term consequences. Showing the village at the height of the blood selling boom shows how the money that blood selling brought in changed the village for the better, explaining why the villagers continued to sell their blood, even when they knew the risks, and that they were being taken advantage of. Showing the village in this state also shows the greed of some of the villagers, such as Ding Hui, as they begin to take advantage of their fellow villagers and, and make decisions regarding their conduct as “bloodheads” that will prove to have devastating consequences. This can be seen in my model, as the village has gained a new paved road, as well as luxurious new homes, built by the bloodheads such as Ding Hui and filled with modern luxury items, the possession of which would have been unthinkable before the bold selling began. Lastly, showing the village after the effects of the blood selling have taken hold. With the villagers stricken by the AIDS epidemic and dying “like falling leaves”, and with a severe drought destroying crops and further devastating the village, almost everyone in the village has either died or moved away, and the few people who have not are close to doing so. The village, having been devastated as a result of the blood selling boom, and the decisions that were made by the villagers at the time, is all but dead. We see this clearly in my model, where all the new roads and homes built during the blood boom have fallen into disrepair and been abandoned by their former owners. Meanwhile, the few villagers left alive are destitute, unable to do anything but wait to die. Ding Hui, meanwhile, finally pays the price for his greed and exploitation of the villagers, when his father murders him as an act of revenge. This downfall, as illustrated in my models, shows the viewer the theme, present throughout the book, that making decisions out of greed, and without regard for the long term consequences, can lead to devastation.