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The inspiration of this collage comes from a book of world’s greatest oil paintings I read before. On the left of the top is the original version of The Scream. Later I find some interesting pictures that derive from The Scream and make them into a composite image. I’ve tried to extract the character who’s screaming from each picture and paste them all onto the original one, but it turns out to be a little bit disordered and weird. So I just put them into a sequence and see what I can get from this collage.

This painting, which is part of a series of paintings done by Munch, has always been interpreted as a symbol of human emotion in relation to expressing despair, anxiety and agony in various ways. The distortion of the figure and color can be easily spotted in the top left picture which is originally a counterfeit. In the second row and third row, things become much different. I think these interesting pictures have already been more or less photoshoped by someone else. By viewing them, I have a feeling that the consolidated interpretation of desperate human emotion is falling apart and something of postmodernism can be mixed into the understanding as well. Like, the first and the third in the second row are mocking politics to some extent; the cute one, at least I think so, in the middle seems like a droll conversation between two great powers in a certain field. Pictures in the third row are much more diverse in the colors and figures. They offer a subtle blend of cartoon, Pop art and popular Emoji with the famous painting.

Baron restates Derrida’s argument in her book that “archives are structured according to the logics of power that determine which objects are preserved stored, and revered and which are excluded, thereby creating the past rather than simply preserving it”. It reminds me that apart from the impressive symbolization of human surviving, The Scream also represent a power of art that people tend to respect for the most part, but there are still many who’d love to make something new out of it. I think this process is in accord with the archive effect in terms of reforming the archival document “as an experience of reception rather than an indication of official sanction or storage location”. Now I find myself more affected by this collage in an interesting way of being attracted and fascinated rather than the “feeling of loss”.