Nearly all the students have already headed home for the upcoming Spring Festival. Luckily (from top to bottom) Wang Nan, Li Qian, Zhan Dan Ping and Xiao Yan were still around, and so we were able to have a last dinner together to say good-bye. I feel very happy to have gotten to know them, and hope the very best for them in the future. They have been a wonderful resource of information about modern day Chinese society and I have learnt much from them. I hope they can say the same about me.
December 2nd was the final teaching day after a 12 week course with Class 06. After working hard at finishing their assignments, and putting together a presentation for the head of the department, the class, with fellow teachers Hong Rongman and Zeng Yu Lin, invited me out for dinner. Above a teeny clip of the dinner table. Afterwards we all went to a karaoke bar, of which I fortunately do not have any clip, as my first experience at singing along with a bad cover version of Madonnas’ “Like a Virgin” should not be recorded for history. It was bad. I did, however, very much enjoy watching the students sing and dance…some of them have truly great voices. It was the first time I had been to a karaoke club, and I found it quite disarming. Their style of singing ranged from shyly singing along to outrageous play-acting, making believe that you yourself are the star. It all seems so innocent and sweet.
Some weeks ago, in a shop selling all kinds of small accessories, my eye fell on this object:
a little cushion shaped hanger, the sort of thing kids here might attach to their cellphone, or, as in my case, attach to the key chain. It caught my eye, firstly because of it’s graphic quality, and secondly it seemed to be a Chinese character, that, at the same time, also clearly is meant to be a face.
On seeing it hanging around my neck, along with my key, my students laughed, and seemed to think it was cool (or ridiculous, I’m not quite sure which) that I was wearing it.
Being curious about this character/face I decided to see what I could find out.
Only to discover, unbeknownst to me, that I was wearing the hippest, subculture internet thingummy of the moment. It’s based on the character 囧.
Pronounced jiong in Mandarin, en gwing in Cantonese, it originally meant “bright” or ” brightness shining from window”. Starting from Taiwan, then spreading to Hong Kong and mainland China, this ancient character, out of use already for many years, gained a new lease of life, and meaning, on internet messageboards. 囧 is used to express shock, embarrasment, surprise, sadness, and stupidity.
According to this article 囧 has moved outside of the internet community and into the off-line world, becoming a valuable asset to brands trying to connect to young internet-savvy consumers.
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So it seems that 囧 is a type of Chinese emoticon. I find it intriguing that a smiley, 
, or any other emoticon, is composed of keyboard characters that are chosen for their shape, not their meaning or sound, in order to convey a sentiment.
Whereas 囧 is an existing character, made up out of radicals, each radical already representing an object, and the combination of these radicals representing the idea “brightness shining from window”. This ancient ideographic character, is then transformed into a pictographic image, with a meaning that now is determined by it’s shape: a sad, surprised face. 囧 :O
Last night, Nan, and some of her fellow students, invited me to join them for dinner at Xiao Zhou village. The occasion was mid-autumn festival, an evening when most Chinese get together with their families. In the village, children were walking around with paper lanterns. Students dressed up in costumes (cos-play according to my students) heading to a party. Fire-crackers were constantly being set off, and my friends brought huge paper lanterns (like the south american globos) on which we all wrote wishes before releasing them above the river. It was a clear night, and the moon was full and bright. On release our lanterns rapidly made their way over the motorway overpass nearby, reaching a great height within less than 30 seconds.
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/
After 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:
In the months preceding my arrival here in Guangzhou, I put together a tenative curriculum for a term of teaching Interactive Media Art & Public Art here in China. I am greatly indebted to Renée Kool, who was my advisor, mentor, co-developer and crucial sparring partner, in the developement of ideas and methods for teaching these coming months.
Monday the 7th of september, I finally began my long anticipated term of teaching at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. The class, with circa 30 4th year bachelor students, is more-or-less evenly made up out of boys and girls, mostly around 23 years of age. All are students of various digital media related disciplines, and I have yet to discover what that entails when I first see their work.
For the kick-off, one of the things we did is take photos of each other, post them on the wall, and add notes to them (like tags), giving information such as name, where originally from, what fields are you interested in, what do you hope to do after graduation, etcetera. (an idea partly inspired by Carolyn Strauss )
For me this is a wonderful way to begin to get to know what their references and interests are. And it’s highly entertaining, and sometimes even touching, to see how some of them made an effort to present a specific persona.
Here are some examples:
Of course it’s only fair that I participate too:
And Hong Rongman,
my associate professor and assistant:
