The first month of teaching is over.
Last sunday, the students presented the final results of the first assignment.
I’ll be posting some photos of their presenations on my GAFA blog (this blog is specifically for the lessons)
But for now, you can see a mini-reportage of one of the student projects there:
http://www.remarksfromafar.com/china/2009/gafa/
Archive for October, 2009
first month of teaching over…
Friday, October 2nd, 2009While Nan(in yellow shirt) translates for me, Hao Ning
fresh(wo)men
Friday, October 2nd, 2009After weeks of daily training, morning, noon and night, the freshman students completed their initiation ritual which was marked by a ceremony on the sportsfield.
Initially I had been surprised, and a little shocked to see hoards of students wearing military outfits swarming over the campus. The uniforms looked big on them, petite chinese girls with tiny waists, in camouflage outfits and the equally small-waisted young men, did n’t look particularly daunting in their uniforms. There was not a lot of uniformity to be seen in their marching, limbs flailing out of sync. But as the weeks progressed, the tightness of their formations improved, and at the final ceremony it was clear that they had learned quite a bit.
Hong Rongman, my associate-teacher, believes that these weeks of training are a valuable experience for this generation of kids. This is the I “want” generation, one-child policy kids whom have been the focus of all the attention from parents and grandparents. Spoiled to the bone, you might say, and maybe lacking certain social skills needed when you live and work with others. The period of military training throws them together and they have to not only learn discipline and self-sufficiency, but also to give and take.
The girls certainly aquired some nice martial arts kind of poses:
how an overpass
makes me feel connected
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Before arriving in Guangzhou I knew that my accommodation would be in the new campus of the GAFA in “University Town”. This conglomeration of universities on an island in the Pearl River Delta hardly appealed to me as a place to live for 5 months. It being a highly artificial environment, it lacks the charm (and chaos) of bustling, messy, but lively downtown Guangzhou. But now that I’m here, and settled, I feel that I can deal with 5 months of campus-life. The relative peace and quiet, though sometimes maybe a little boring, also affords me the mental space and rest to actually work, study, read and reflect. One of the features that eases my unrest at being an hour removed from real city life, is the elevated highway, passing by (almost over) the GAFA campus. For some reason it makes me feel connected to the metropolis. And I marvel at it’s scale.
view from my balcony…
>click on images below to enlarge
heels 02
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
可爱-ness
Thursday, October 1st, 2009The character 可 can be used to emphasize, the character 爱 means: to love.
Together they form kě ài, which in Chinese means cute.
(and here I get a little sidetracked, sorry! – initially I wrote: Together they spell kě ài, which is the chinese word for cute. But can you say that you spell when you use characters instead of letters? And is 可爱 a word or is it an idea? a notion? a symbol?)
Ok, to continue:
Living on a university filled island surrounded by twenty-something year olds, the level of cute-ness, predominant in (popular) visual culture in China anyway, is almost unbearable. Well, I exaggerate, it’s not so much unbearable, as much as completely alien to me. I feel little or no connection with it. Although admittedly, I’m sometimes amused by it. For instance at the campus printshop, the USB ports are all decorative, transformed into toys:
And when I’m uploading my files onto their computers, the screen is inundated with cute animations while I wait. A little cartoon penguin waddles across desktop as the file is busy transferring:
That children and young people have a taste for all this cute-ness, is one thing.
But the design of the visual identities for some major public and international events in China such as the upcoming Asian Games here in Guangzhou, the Olympics of 2008 and the upcoming Worldexpo in Shanghai, is also pervaded by cuteness.
Coming from the Netherlands, where, not for nothing, one of the internationally reknowned design companies is named Droog Design (Dry Design), all this cute-ness conflicts with my notions of what good, grown-up design should be. And that makes me curious. What is the idea that people have here about cute-ness? Why do cartoonish characters have such enormous appeal? What is this compulsion to animate all kinds of objects by giving them faces? I’m sure there are some interesting a theories to be imagined…and I might give that a try sometime on this blog. Keep an eye on the 可爱-ness tag.