Methods of Nature: Landscapes from the Gettysburg College Collection

Methods of Nature: Landscapes from the Gettysburg College Collection is the third annual exhibition curated by students enrolled in the Art History Methods course. The exhibition is an exciting academic endeavor and incredible opportunity for engaged learning, research, and curatorial experience. The five student curators are Molly Chason ’17, Leah Falk ’18, Shannon Gross ’17, Bailey Harper ’19 and Laura Waters ’19. The selection of artworks in this exhibition includes the depiction of landscape in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, American and East Asian cultural traditions in various art forms from traditional media of paintings and prints to utilitarian artifacts of porcelain and a paper folding fan. Landscape paintings in this exhibition are inspired by nature, specific locales and literature. Each object carries a distinctive characteristic, a mood, and an ambience. Collectively, they present a multifaceted view of the landscape in the heart and mind of the artists and intended viewers. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1020/thumbnail.jp

Art Directed Watercolor Shader for Non-photorealistic Rendering with a Focus on Reflections

In this research, I demonstrated that emulating painterly reflections is impossible using existing modeling, compositing and rendering software that does not provide programming capabilities. To obtain painterly reflections, we need to emulate three aspects of painterly reflections: (1) shape of reflections; (2) glossiness of reflections; and (3) colors of reflections. The first two turn out to be relatively easy. However, despite the perceived simplicity of color reproduction, the third one turned out to be hardest without developing our own proprietary tools. To demonstrate the difficulty, I have developed a shader using commercial rendering and shading software that does not provide explicit programming power. I assigned my shader as a surface material to 3D objects. Using my shader, I was able to create computer generated watercolor style renderings without reflections. My shader provide rendering effects such as diffuse, contours, specularity, shadow, and reflections. Although I can faithfully emulate non-reflected regions of given water-color paintings, I demonstrate that my shader cannot produce reflection colors that are faithful to colors of original reflections

Avant Garde in Chinese Art

The question that I propose to examine here is to what extent or in what sense there has been an avant-garde presence in Chinese art. And in what sense is the avant-garde present in contemporary Chinese art connected to avant-garde in the west. Before examining the relevance of the avant-garde to developments in Chinese art, it is necessary to provide a brief account of avant-garde in western art

Enhancing the Appreciation of Traditional Chinese Painting Using Interactive Technology

In this paper, we present a two-part study. The first part was a cultural appreciation study. Through this study, we explored the specific approach of cross-cultural aesthetic appreciation and mapped out the potential insights for a prototype design. In the second part, we carried out a design-led study. We designed a tablet application and conducted focus group studies to explore the interactive technology that assists in the support of cross-cultural audiences’ aesthetic appreciation and engagement of traditional Chinese painting. Based on these findings, we went on to further explore an approach of interactive engagement which is specific to supporting cross-cultural appreciation, while also reflecting upon the interactive design suggestions for the development of aesthetic appreciation to offer various transferable insights to the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) community

Decolonising Cinematography Education: Experimenting with Lighting Ratios and Textures for Black and Asian Skin Tones

Cinematographers are trained to control and measure the relative difference in brightness between two parts of a scene, or a face, for expressive purposes. Painting is often referred to for inspiration as practitioners learn to compose and represent light and shadow in an aesthetically considered manner. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the painters generally studied by film-making students are mostly from Renaissance traditions and produced work featuring predominantly White models. This gap of racial representation in cinematographic pedagogy is stark and has long been overlooked. This article mounts an enquiry into the lack of diversity in cinematography education, examining how different aesthetic traditions, such as Asian ink paintings, could pave new ways for decolonising the conventional conceptions of lighting ratios. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative case studies undertaken in university workshops, I discuss how students respond to Black and Asian artwork as visual references when they are tasked with lighting models with non-White skin tones to accommodate the different reflectance of their skins. By comparing the learning outcomes and current industry techniques for optimising screen representation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups, the article evaluates how students respond to learning from modern artwork that promotes diverse identities, and argues for the benefits of integrating greater inclusiveness into cinematography

Tracing the Past, Drawing the Present

The group of work, Rising Water, Floating Islands is inspired by traditional Chinese scroll landscape paintings. Such landscape paintings combine meticulous technique, compositional complexity, and tension between representation and abstraction to reveal an alternative universe that waits discovery amid our mundane existence. In “Rising Water, Floating Islands,” I explore the political and social ramifications of the ongoing cultural conflict between traditional and emergent contemporary values. By combining traditional Chinese elements and techniques with my own markings and gestural adaptation in my painting, I give the audience the opportunity to contemplate the implications of our present digital condition through traditional esthetic forms. I value the power of traditional Chinese esthetics to reveal philosophical dispositions, and I incorporate this perspective through the mark-making system that I created, which brings references to contemporary technologies and social systems into emotional assimilations with the painting as an alternative way of being in the world

The Poetic Dimension of Everyday Aesthetic Appreciation. Perspectives from East-Asian Cultures

As Yuriko Saito, one of the main exponents of everyday aesthetics holds, East-Asian cultures have long established a deep link between artistic practices and everyday life, transforming apparently mundane practices such as having a cup o ftea with cakes into a highly ritualized form of art (cha-no-yu) and allowing us to enjoy the fleeting moment. The tea ceremony example is grounded, as this paper aims at showing, on a whole East-Asian worldview (as exemplfieied in Confucianism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism philosophies) whereby aesthetic appreciation is deeply pervaded by a poetic feeling, mainly consisting in the interactive harmony or attunement established with the particular circumstances of one’s own life due precisely to its fleeting and evanescent nature. To accomplish this, savouring and perceiving the uniqueness ingrained in every single human experience, the adequate attitude is the poetic one, due to its holistic and non-discriminative nature. Having as its focus everyday life, or simply put, life as such in its specificity, traditional artistic practices in East-Asia as the arts of the brush, garden design or utilitarian crafts such as pottery, become means of revealing what, due to its closeness, lies hidden in ordinary experience. Utilitarian arts are, in this sense, a priviledged way of conveying this end due precisely to its practical link with ordinary existence, preventing the eventual arousal of a purely formal and detached apprehension. The only coherent way to develop this awareness of the extraordinary in the ordinary, to use Leddy’s expression, is through the main feature of all poetic qualities: indirect allusion and subdued reference so that what is close at hand may shine in a different light. Particularly, in association with Japanese Zen Buddhism, where the rootedness of aesthetics in the ordinary is stronger, it has frequently adopted the form of restraint, contention, reserve, or, as Saito puts it, “insufficiency”. This paper aims at showing with the help of a few examples how this difuse poetic attitude, so prevalent in Traditional East-Asian contexts, is required not only in standardized art practices, but also in a wider aesthetic level of awareness of our ordinary experiences. In order to justify these claims, it will refer first to the ideal of harmony or poetic resonance in Chinese aesthetics and then it will refer to some concrete Japanese aesthetic categories inspired by Zen Buddhism, such as mono-no-aware, sabi, wabi, or yugen

ink/stone - English brochure

English brochure for the exhibition ink/stonehttps://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/ink-stone-ephemera/1004/thumbnail.jp