Visual Culture and Cultural Misunderstandings

This is my fourth year. Teaching art. In China. But I still make cultural mistakes, almost daily.

My friend blogs about the blending of cultures. He's truly an expert in this thing. Not just an expert--he's a professional. It is his job. For me, I just fumble along as I teach art.

Just this past month, I made two big blunders, both art-related, that continue to humble me on my cross-cultural journey. First I designed an image that some view as Satanic. And then this week...well let's back it up.

For last year's Gala, I did a wall of monochromatic self-portraits down the hallway to our art gallery. I wanted to do something similar this year, but not portraits. I decided to have students create designs with the following parameters:

     The design must be symmetrical.
     The design must include a border.
     The design must only use one color.
     The design must incorporate your first name (English).

The colors were assigned based on my class color coding. Brilliant! Until I told the first graders they could only use red and they had to write their name. BUT THAT MEANS DEATH! Yes, one boy insisted that to write your name in red means death. At which point in time, bits of cultural lessons from the past four years rushed through my brain and I realized the only four stipulations for this project forced the students to walk under a ladder, break a mirror, have a black cat cross their path, and step on a crack to break their mother's back. Except maybe worse. Because I can't think of an American equivalent---something that superstition says if you do this, you will die.

I popped open my door, looked into the Fine Arts office across the hall, and quick consulted with two colleagues, a Hong-Kong-Canadian (secondary art teacher) and Korean-American (elementary band teacher). Yes, writing your name in red is bad. It's an old thing that might mean death for you or death from your mother, depending on your tradition. It is an old thing. But it is still a thing. So what could I do? I'd already done the project in blue and yellow with no cultural faux-pas. I couldn't change it now for first grade!

To appease the kids, I added some brown colored pencils to the mix. If they felt strongly about the red name association, they could write their name in brown but do the rest of the design in red. That seemed to settle the most violent opponents. Now I'm just hoping parents won't be offended when they see the red name designs at next week's Gala...

Class Pets?

With each class period, my love for Dumpling grew and grew.

     He won't hurt you.
     He's been here since Christmas vacation.
     He stays up by the lights and never even comes down by people.

You can only repeat those phrases so many times before that little (nasty) moth endears himself to your heart.

It wasn't just me. Even one fifth grader remarked "I normally don't like bugs but I love Dumpling!"

And then we found out Dumpling had a love of his own, Honey Drop. Yes, one of my students noticed that there were TWO moths. Which only brought more questions. How do you know it is a boy? Which one is Dumpling? How do you know that's Dumpling and not Honey Drop? The simple solutions---"Miss Brown told me" and "Dumpling is the one that flies around. Honey Drop likes to sit and rest."

What happened next was magical. I had just told a room of crazy first graders that Dumpling had never touched anyone and then he landed right on me!

The students decided that he landed on me because he loved me. We did spend lots of time together. And amazingly, having preached a message of moth love to students for a few weeks, I didn't freak out at all. There was a moth on my shoulder and I was still as can be, trying to keep him there as long as possible so my TA could grab a camera and document this!






Me and Dumpling!

(Obviously this is Dumpling, not Honey Drop, because he landed on me. Honey Drop likes to sit and rest.)




The first graders couldn't stop talking about our mothy friends for the rest of class.

     I wish I had a moth as a pet.
     I think he eats the m&ms you give him.
     I want to name him Bumpling.
     I want to name him Shine because he likes the light.
     If you say the moth's name, will it come to you?

Then the weather got warm. Just as my Chinese friend suggested, Dumpling only liked me for my warm classroom. Spring break came and went, and there went Dumpling and Honey Drop.

I miss the buzzing of their wings in the lights. The craziness that ensued every time they made an appearance. The fact that I had a class pet--me, the one who has a strong aversion to animals.

Our classroom gave our mothy friends a warm and welcoming place to spend the winter, and they gave us many smiles, a few shreaks, and lots of laughs on cold winter days.

Weaving a Bulletin Board Backdrop

A weaving bulletin board from my first year teaching gained new attention this year when bulletin board blogs and pinterest pins brought viewers to the display.

Last week, I decided to revamp the concept for a display of 5th grade reused bag weavings.




I like the bold graphic look of the black and white checkerboard on the exposed cork.
I also love how the board is a 3-dimensional demonstration of weaving.

On the opposite board, I simply displayed some of the weavings in a staggered arrangement.

a year

It’s been a year.
A year of transition.
A year of goodbyes, of hellos, of tears and laughter and hugs.
But mostly just a year.

     A year since the day I never could have anticipated.

I find myself back in the role of graphic designer, but it’s different this time. This time, the clients are my friends, my coworkers, my student’s parents. And the product—a shirt to honor his life.

It’s his year. The year of the dragon. He would have been twelve this June. This year would have been goodbye in a different way. Goodbye from elementary school. On to middle school with the secondary art teacher. But he’s not there eating in the cafeteria when I walk past the sixth grade boys.

So I sit at the lightbox in my classroom and trace elements from a dragon design we found online. Then I find fonts to match. Architect’s Daughter, based on the handwriting of another one in our community. And the appropriate Chinese characters to relate. A border finishes it off, to mimic an artist’s seal, a rounded square chop.

It’s a sobering project. One I never wish to repeat. To be asked to use my skills to celebrate his life is an honor. That we are celebrating his life, not living it with him now, brings fresh tears.

As a community, we gathered today and watched an hour of home videos.
Tomorrow is a school baseball game. He loved baseball.
And the shirts will be a continual reminder of our friend, our student, our brother, our son.

Tim, we love and remember you.

The red design will be printed on a yellow shirt, with the dragon on the front and the words on the back. The proceeds from the sales will be added to the fund that honors his memory and his love for music and the arts. This fund will be used to purchase things that touched his life and that he loved, such as major instruments for the band program, special afterschool programs in music and the arts, etc.

Jian Zhi 剪纸

When I was in elementary school, my mother took art classes in the community to learn scherenschnitte. I've never tried it myself, but paper snowflakes are a family legacy, passed down to me from an aunt who has done snowflakes to represent the different twelve days of Christmas.

Now I live in China, and the art of the paper cut is still deeply tied to culture.

I would love to do a unit on the paper cut, making connections across time and throughout cultures to the designs, techniques, and cultural significance of the paper cut. Just a dream. You could easily use the medium to explore symmetrical and asymmetrical designs or positive and negative space, but symbolism, patterning, decoration, line, shape, emphasis, movement, and a host of others could apply. The image on the right is a paper cut that I designed, then digitally manipulated as part of a master's assignment during Chinese New Year last year.

Back in November, I passed on the paper cut unit that only exists in my head to my new TA. I was going to a curriculum meeting in another city and China and would be gone Monday-Wednesday. I only have elementary art Monday-Thursday, so I decided my TA would have a special week, teaching all the elementary classes with an isolated lesson of Chinese art. I had suggested calligraphy, but he preferred paper cutting. I tried to explain the big ideas, enduring understandings, and interdisciplinary connections. How I wanted them to learn the significance in the Chinese culture and relate the designs to concepts they'd been learning with me. Ultimately, it was more of a follow-the-directions lesson emphasizing fine motor skills than a cultural exploration of a medium and its use of symmetrical and asymmetrical designs. But it was a start. I don't think he was comfortable with spending large amounts of time in discussion during the lesson. Presenting images, directing conversation, and educating on the history of the paper cut in China using English. Instead, he preferred to spend the hour on art production.

The results were mixed. Many students were not able to complete the designs he prepared in the class period. And as he is new to teaching at our school, and he hasn't worked with my students, classroom management was difficult on both ends. Still it was a learning experience, especially for him.

To celebrate for Chinese New Year, I asked him to create a display of some of the work, finished or unfinished, on the two bulletin boards in our hallway. The words were a struggle, as I insisted he cut them out of paper, not print them from a computer and staple the copy paper onto the white background. It's a board on paper cuts, so paper cut words further illustrate the concept. The English is literal translations of common Chinese New Year sayings. I wish all the paper cuts were done on the bright paper, not the pastel used in the bottom left of one board.

Otherwise, I think the boards are a festive way to display this one day venture into a traditional Chinese art form and decorate the school for Chinese New Year.