Teaching Computer Arts to Chinese students using Emoji
Interesting article at Medium discussing the experiences of Giorgio Mininno teaching western digital art practices to Chinese students:
As soon as we started the course we understood that students were very bored by the Computer Art program, which contained a huge part of theoretical lessons. Understanding subjects as Net.art implies that you are confident with the history of western contemporary art and with the conceptual works of the nineteenth century.
Often, computer artists make an extreme uses of new technologies, sometimes pushing the digital aesthetic to its boundaries.Due to their very different cultural conception of art and beauty, the students were wary of the artworks discussed during class, sometimes judging them as ugly or stupid, sometimes misunderstanding (or missing) the social activism hidden behind the works of many net.artists.
During the lessons we realized that the concept of beauty is different in Asia, and the same is true for the concepts of elegance, order or creativity.In western society one of the main goal of a creative person is to reach originality, to be different, to make something new. But in our chinese classroom it seems this wasn’t so appealing. The school programs, the tradition of copying, the cultural environment and the government laws work together to annihilate every personal initiative (except for the business one, of course).
You can read the entire piece at Medium here