Please Don't Touch

To satisfy my non-western fine arts class for my Eleanor Roosevelt College general education requirements, I thought what better place to take such a class than outside the west? I thought it was a good idea; it was actually one suggested to us by our college at UCSD. And it really was a good idea—just not in the way I imagined.

I had a highly romanticized vision of what taking a non-western fine arts class in a non-western country, so to speak, was going to be like. I couldn’t really say what I expected, but this class was definitely not it. All that can be said is that I’m probably getting more out of such a class here than I would back home.

I actually don’t mean to go negative, because I genuinely like the class (though I had to go to the art museum across the harbor early yesterday to look at a handscroll for a research paper due Friday). Ultimately, it’s an art history class, so it is research and text based with a lot of critical analysis (though thankfully in a socio-historical setting).

So far, we’ve talked about Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism art, as well as Chinese Folk Religion art such as the banners used in funeral processions (yeah, I forgot the academic name). For Indian Buddhism, we went into stupas and depictions of the Buddha, how we know that the figure is a Buddha, and so on. Regarding Japanese Buddhism, we went over architecture and the implications on art that Buddhism and Shintoism had in their meeting and mixing. For Chinese art we covered works commissioned by emperors as well as handscrolls and aspects of calligraphy.

There were these two weeks where we had a real hands-on application for the class that seems to have pretty much served as the highlight of the class. For one lecture, we met at the Hong Kong Museum of Art where the professor meticulously went over several pieces related to the focus of the class. For one tutorial we got to practice Chinese calligraphy and painting with the same brush (which turns out is much, much harder than it looks). For another tutorial, we went to the art museum on campus where the curator set up a room for us where we got to see some of the more ancient stuff up close and actually get to handle some of the less expensive ceramic pieces.

Besides the papers and the memorization of particular artists names as well as identification of particular pieces, the class is shaping up to be a really good choice.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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