Lesson reflection from Art:21

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

   This video series introduced many different kinds of contemporary artists to viewers and point out artists’ specific way to express art. I loved the style of composition in this series that includes artists’ profound interviews. These gave me a great chance to understand their philosophy and artistic inspiration. Even though I watched few series, there were a lot of ideas related to art and art instruction. I found a Korean artist named Kimsooja in this series. Her works could be a little bit complicated to me too but I am pretty sure that I have a better understanding of her works than others have because the background of the works is strongly connected to Korean traditional emotion or empathy.

     I believe that her works can give us good source of art instruction. Her works include philosophical factors based on our everyday life rather than abstract objects. In her work titled “A needle Woman”, the needle can have both characteristics of aggression and cure. She said after needles make thread and textile connect with each other, they left little spot and just disappear. She hopes that viewers consider her as the needle making them meet new world through herself or her works. There’s another famous work using textile titled “Bottari” which means a Korean traditional bundle. Bottari includes opposite meanings. One can be a family, couple, settlement and comfort when it opens and other is separation, determination and farewell when it ties up.

   I would like to design my art class in two different ways which are encouraged by Kim’s work.

1.  Finding new and different meaning from everyday life.

   First of all, I would like to show students some artworks which are made by familiar stuff and have them figure out how the artists found different and implicative meaning from the stuff. After discussion, I will give them some time to think about their familiar stuff which could be meaningful or special to them. I am willing to encourage them to choose the stuffs which they want to reconstruct based on their experience or their belief.

    Second, students share their ideas with showing the picture of object or the real one. At this point, it is important for students to get sympathy or empathy from others. It is not necessarily but trying to make sense could be helpful for them to think critically or philosophically and, of course, recreate the object in the new ways. While sharing ideas with class, I need to prepare well formed questions to help them to interact with each other through synthesizing or analyzing.    

   Now, each students starts making something by using their materials. I would like to offer some information about the way of representation which can make their object much more meaningful and effective. After finishing making their work, I motivate them to give a presentation about what they made and what kind of meaning the object have, why it is very important to them. At this time, I help them use their philosophy or critical thinking. This process could be frequently related to social studies or other subjects. It includes interdisciplinary connections which make students understand well.

2.   Visual Culture

    Among visual culture, there are a lot of artworks focusing on some specific cultural, historical or economic characteristics like Kim’s works (in this case, it could be strange to American students). To understand this kind of artworks having the unfamiliar aspect, students need to know about many different factors related to the culture that the work interacts with.

    I would like to show students specific artwork or materials related to unfamiliar cultural aspects by using video clip, picture, photo or commercial that are carefully chosen.  Before giving some clues, I would like to help them imagine or guess what the work is about or what is happening to the work or artists. With gathering students’ opinions, I would encourage them to use their background information. Students are engaged to communicate each other and synthesized their thought.

    After that, I starts explaining a little bit about the objects or theme the art used or the background information which has same role as the paper in museum. Through questioning and deep conversation, we can narrow the theme of artworks and even find other meanings that the creator didn’t intend.

   In this studying, I believe that the artist’s intent is not very significant to students but getting used to unfamiliar artworks and finding the meaning in a lot of views could be more important. This process develops student’s interpretation skills and builds the progress of critical thinking.