Edumacation

Last week's class was pretty interesting. I've never seen a video of one of my professors drunk, let alone drinking anything alcoholic. It was pretty fun to watch Professor Chuan roll around and write in his drunken state. It almost reminded me of that one Jackie Chan movie where he fought with drunken style kung-fu. I guess in a way, they were similar in that they were both fighting for something. Though in Professor Chuan's case, it wasn't as literal.

I was doing some research on art in the 80's in China. Many people say that art really came out in China during the 80's. The government started to support art a little bit more during the 80's. At least, they didn't censor art as much during the 80's. However, there are some people that argue that art in China is more "censored" now than it ever was before. People argue that many artists in China are more concerned with whether or not their art will sell now as opposed to being concerned with the art itself. So even though art may have been much more expressive in the 80's. It has become diluted since many artists have turned to profit rather than expression in their art.

Going back to the video we saw. Many of the pieces in the video were very different from what many people would see from the Western world. I felt that a lot of the pieces were pretty graphic and had a lot of feeling behind them. I looked up some more recent pieces by famous artists in China, and a lot of them had a very Western feel to them. There was a lot of pop art and paintings that reminded me of works I've seen from Andy Warhol and other famous Western artists. It made me feel like Chinese artists were just replicating what they saw from the Western world, and it didn't seem much different. All in all, I think the art in China from the 80's was good, and now art in China s diluted with Western influence.