Cai Guo-Qiang was born in China on December 8, 1957. His father was a calligrapher and traditional painter who worked in a bookstore. At an early age, Cai was exposed to Western literature and traditional Chinese art. As a student at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985, Guo-Qiang studied stage design. His art moved across several mediums including drawing, installation, video and performance art. In 1986, he moved to Japan. During the time from 1986-1995, while living in Japan, he explored using gunpowder in his drawings. Cai moved to the United States in 1995. He currently resides in New Jersey on a converted horse farm with his wife and two children. The farm was converted into a studio, exhibition space and a 9,700 square …show more content…
He grew up in a time and setting where cannon blasts and fireworks where common occurrences. These experiences have been inspiration for some of his gunpowder drawings and explosion events. During his late teens and early twenties, Guo-Qiang acted in two films, The Spring and Fall of a Small Town and Real Kung Fu of Shaolin. His early work was inspired by traditional Chinese culture. His artwork consists of a variety of symbols, narratives, fengshui, traditions, shanshui paintings, flora and fauna, portraiture, Chinese medicine and fireworks. He draws on the Maoist/Socialist concepts for content in many of his pieces. Cai is among the first artist to contribute to the discussion of Chinese art and is considered very important to the history of Chinese contemporary art. As a young student, his stick figure or abstract patterns in oil and gunpowder gave him a place in the 85 New Wave movement, but he moved to Japan in 1986 just as the movement was gaining speed. His initial gunpowder drawings were meant to confront China’s controlled artistic traditions. Eventually leading him to experiment with explosives on a larger scale and resulted in the development of his signature “explosion
Mao Zedong was born December 26, 1893 and lived until September 9 in 1976 when he died in Beijing China. Mao Zedong died from the Motor neuron disease. Mao Zedong was born into a peasant family in the place Shoshanna near Hunan. During the years of 1928 throughout 1931. Mao Zedong and others that worked with Mao Zedong established armies in the hinterlands and created the Red Army which was known as the most feared “army” in china during the time of the revolution.
There may been times when people have been treated unfairly, just because of their appearance or their social life.
Ah Xian born in Beijing in 1960 left china following the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, also known as tank man incident, and moved to Sydney Australia. Having moved from his native country, Ah Xian wanted his work to represent that “cultural identity is permanent and no matter what other places and influences one
I learned about many significant artwork and artist in this class. This class provided me with a better understanding of the history of the world Art, but also helped me understand the development of art style. However, among all of these precious pieces of artwork, there are two special ones that caught my attention: The Chinese Qin Terracotta Warriors and The Haniwa. Each of them represents the artist’s stylistic characteristics and cultural context. Although they represented different art of rulers, historical values, and scenes, there were visible similarities.
Smarr, Janet. “Emperor Wu”. Making of the Modern World 12. Ledden Auditorium, La Jolla, CA. 17 Feb. 2012. Lecture.
Secondly, Emperor Huizong was a patron of arts and in his painting academy he highlighted 3 aspects of painting: realism, systematic study, and poetic idea. (source dri buku yg foto di library) These 3 aspects were clearly shown in Cranes above Kaifeng: Auspicious Cranes which indicates the amount of control Emperor Huizong had on the visualization of auspicious events.
“I don’t want to be part of this kind of denying reality. We live in this time. We have to speak out” (Klayman). Ai Weiwei is an internationally known Chinese artist as well as activist, and his motivation and determination can be summed up by this quote. In all of his pieces, Weiwei critically examines the social and administrative issues facing China today. Many of his works exhibit multiple themes that can be interpreted in various different ways. This lends itself to the universal appeal of his art and makes it a more effective medium of conveying his messages to viewers. Ai Weiwei’s activist artwork—and activist artwork in general—is important to society because it effectively forces the viewer to engage in a self-reflective process that makes the viewer critically examine his or her own beliefs and world. Nevertheless, censorship greatly hinders the dissemination of the critical and thought provoking messages of Ai Weiwei’s art and makes his artwork less effective. In order to gain a better understanding of the relationship of Ai Weiwei’s activist art and the Communist Party’s subsequent censorship, I will examine Ai Weiwei’s influential childhood, his specific brand of activist artwork, the censorship of the Chinese government and the effects of censorship on the effectiveness of Ai Weiwei’s art.
Most films captivate the audience’s interest through the main character. This film did just that. Through the main character Li Cunxin, I was able to notice the amount of hard work and dedication which lead Li to become a famous ballet dancer known worldwide. The film, based on the autobiography by Li Cunxin, “Mao’s Last Dancer” directed by Bruce Beresford is about a Chinese boy named Li Cunxin who’s born into a large family of 6 boys. At the age of eleven, Li got chosen from a poverty-stricken Chinese village by Madam Mao’s cultural representatives to leave his family and study ballet in Beijing. This film focussed on his eventual departure from China to U.S.A after being selected by a world leading choreographer, Ben Stevenson including the
McClung was born at St. Louis, Missouri in 1894 and moved to Dallas in 1899 where she remained. She studied art in the Dallas studios of Texas artists where she received a B.A. in art and English and a B.S in education. In 1939, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought McClung’s painting (Lancaster Valley, 1936) which made her the
From looking at Nash’s charcoal and pastel drawings, I could see that he was influenced by Japanese Zen ink paintings, which were influenced by Chinese calligraphy paintings. He is able to achieve this sense of fluidity with charcoal in a way that I have never seen before. His drawings are very simple and deliver the information he trying to convey, but they are not full of detail and overworked.
The author travels to China as an English teacher for the Hunan Medical School. There he stayed for two years picking up many anecdotes along the way. The author already had spent a large amount of his life studying Chinese language and the martial arts. However, when he arrives in China he meets teachers who have dedicated their entire lives to perfecting a particular art or skill, whether it be martial arts or calligraphy.
China is a communist country, whose citizens faced many difficult situations while trying to fight for their human rights. According to the “Freedom Rankings” from the database CountryWatch China is not a free country. Specifically the Political Rights and Civil Liberties are in their maximum numbers; this means that these rights are confiscated from the people. Therefore freedoms of press, expression, speech, religion, and movement are all severely limited in China. The government has also kept a close watch on art in China; Chinese art went through many different stages starting from the year 1842. But the massacre of Tiananmen Square in the year 1989 was a turning point in the political life of China and on the country's art. Until the year 1992 art in china was underground, but it kept expanding. As a result of that some Chinese artists started to do art works that rebel against their government and express their feelings towards China. One of these artist is the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei who expressed in each piece of art he did, his feelings that China should let its people break away from the rotten traditional, in order to express their thoughts freely.
..., he acknowledges and reinterprets traditional Chinese art in his works. This is his mode of expression via shanshui tradition, and his ways of thinking, viewing and perceiving are infiltrated by the literati ethos. He works in the computer with his countless digital photographs, he creates virtual city landscape, combining the countless small format snapshots in a way that imitate the characteristic structure and composition of the classical shanshui. In his works, we can see that it always visualizes how China is developing and illustrates the consequences of modernization, globalization and the destruction of China’s ecological equilibrium caused by the speedy growth of its megacities over the past few decades. Yang said, “ The media… is not important, no matter what method you use to create, to maintain the creative spirit of the ancients is the most import.”1
Traditional Chinese art is deeply rooted in its philosophy, encompassing Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian schools of thought. The goal of many traditional Chinese landscape artists, as described by Professor To Cho Yee of Michigan-Ann Arbor, is to “reveal the highest harmony between man and nature” through a balance of likeness and unlikeness (Ho). This metaphysical philosophy borrowed art as a vehicle to search for the truth or the “dao”, which is the path to enlightenment. As early as the 5th century, scholar artists such as Su Shi (1037-1101) of the Song dynasty realized that to create likeness, one must understand the object beyond its superficial state and instead capture the spirit of nature; only then can a point of harmony with nature
As said by an unknown essayist, Zen is the “spiritual journey towards enlightenment, known as satori, an awakening that is achieved through the realization that one is already an enlightened being” (1). In keeping with my previous question, traditional arts do have roots in the Zen tradition. In order to reach enlightenment, one has to find meaning within the scope of their everyday experiences. It is not particularly useful to create something new or search for significance in other objects. As day to day life is a component of Zen teaching, and there may be artistry well in the midst of routinal activities. Perhaps art is a guiding tool for those individuals who seek enlightenment. Therefore, the ...