Class Roundup: Asian Art History

Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present (coded FINE1008) was my first and only class to end thus far. I took the final this past Monday and now have but to wait and see what I get in the class. This class roundup serial is for me to conclude my posts about the classes that I’m taking here. It’s odd in a way that everything’s ending. I’ve echoed this before and I will still talk about it later in more detail, but I feel like I’m just not ready to go back yet.

This class was comprised of three assessments apart from general participation in tutorials and attendance at lectures. (I didn’t miss a single class or tutorial for this class). The three assessments consisted of two medium-sized papers and one final examination.

The two term papers were different for me. It was a challenge in that I’d never written a paper for any humanities subject before. Writing for political science, much is quantitatively based, more so at UCSD than at HKU (where we seem to be more on the philosophical side of things), I was constantly unsure of whether what I was doing was right. Furthermore, I wondered whether what I was doing was wrong.

The first paper, we had to choose any one object from either the HKU Art Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, or Sotheby’s art auction house. Not really opting for traveling, I chose a Buddhist statue in the university’s art gallery. It was of Weitou, guardian of the Dharma (named Skanda in Sanskrit). The statue was gilt wood, but I could find hardly anything on Weitou or wood gilding. I was forced to deduce more than I was comfortable with and rely heavily on my own opinions and observations without having published scholars to back me up. When it was all said and done, I got an A-, which considering that she said she doesn’t grade easy, was a relief.

The second paper, we had a choice between two tasks. The first was do create a piece of art ourselves using the techniques talked about in class. This had to be accompanied by a paper describing your own work, telling why and how you used certain techniques. And I preferred to do this assignment. However, seeing that I had about a week to do this assignment (which is no time by my anti-procrastination standards), along with the fact that I had no idea where to get the resources to paint, I felt pressured to do the second task.

The second task was to compare two particular handscrolls, one a copy of the other. My thesis was something to the effect of the techniques used in the copy bring more meaning to its basis in the original. I got a B+ on it.

As for the final, the jury (of one member) is still out. I won’t likely find out my grades until January at the earliest, late March at the latest. All things considered though, I felt I did reasonably well.

It was organized into three parts: image identification, unfamiliar object identification, and short essay.

Image identification consisted of four pictures of works we studied in class. To each we were to place with applicable names and titles as well as a general time frame. In addition, we were to describe the significance of the presented works and analyze their importance, preferably with a sociohistoric emphasis.

To study for this, I printed out all the images from the Fine Arts Interactive Visual Archive (or FAIVA for short), and took extensive notes on them in lecture and in tutorial, as well as on the side, like information on the time period in general and background information on the author and such. As a rough estimate, there were between thirty and forty images that I went through over and over.

Out of the four of them, I probably did a bang-up job on like two and a half of them. The other one and a half I believe I knew enough to earn most of the points.

For the second part, we were to be presented with a (replica) ancient Chinese object. In all honesty, the only reasonable object that she would have given us was an ancient Daoist vessel—and it was.

For this, we had to describe the technique behind making it (basically bronze into a clay mold) and its significance. I figure I did pretty well. I had a lot to say about it, especially because she talked about it extensively in the last tutorial (and I took extensive notes which I studied over).

The last part was a short essay question. We were given the topics beforehand—to describe the function, significance, and perception of a place of leisure either in Ming China or Japan. I went over the Ming Garden, since the professor reviewed that one as well the day before in tutorial.

I have reason to believe that I did decently well in the class. Hopefully I got at least a B+, which they say will round up a third to an A- when grades transfer back to UCSD.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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