DRAWING FROM LIFE

Ma Ju said that her grandmother's mother had worked as an embroiderer in the Qing court, so there is a heritage of traditional handicraft skills in the family, such as embroidery and tiger toe shoes and hats, and her craft was passed down from her grandmother.

Tiger toe shoes and hats look simple, but in fact the workmanship is very complicated, and you have to put in a lot of effort to make them vivid and beautiful. Ma Ju, who is not a good talker, picked up a tiger-toe shoe before talking more. She said, the tiger's head shoes to do complete, at least need to go through the gusset, cut samples, nano-sole, do the upper, embroidered tiger face, on the upper and other 22 processes; tiger's head hat process more elaborate, to be cut, paste, insert, stabbing, sewing and other dozens of processes to complete.

Ma Ju is not only good at making tiger head shoes and hats, but also at embroidery, weaving, sewing, and even raising silkworms, drawing silk and dyeing, and has been awarded the title of "expert in non- heritage" by the Dalian Art Institute. For Ma Ju, the tiger head hat and shoes are handicraft skills passed down from her grandmother to her. Her parents died early, she left the country at the age of five, lost her husband and was laid off in her middle age, but the tricks of fate did not change her kind heart. She has not only trained her daughter to become a master's student at a major university, but also selflessly taught the family skills to the outside world.

Ma Ju, a representative inheritor of the traditional handicraft of tiger head shoes and hats, has never given up on her intangible cultural heritage through thick and thin, even when life has been difficult. After years of exploration and accumulation, she has developed a unique technique and expressiveness, inherited and developed in art, folklore and cultural values, and has selflessly taught her family's skills to the public, promoting the culture of tiger head shoes and hats to the whole country and even the world.

Art does not press the body, but virtue does.

A weak woman with a great sense of righteousness in her heart. She is able to bear the burden of a state enterprise, and if the country is in trouble, she dares to lead the troops. Through her resolute face, we seem to see the tenacious quality of China's five thousand years of existence. This ordinary mother has a noble sentiment that we need to look up to.

SMART kids' erased history should be seen

We were SMART is a documentary completed by director Li Yifan in 2019.In the documentary, Li Yifan forgoes images that can deliver a strong visual impact. He chose to let each of the former SMART kids themselves tell their experiences, how they entered the factory at the age of 12 to 15, how they struggled to live and ran into walls at every turn, what comfort and light they gained from the shell of a killer in those days of extreme loneliness, exhaustion and poverty, and what hurt and attacks they suffered from the mainstream gaze. The director also uses a lot of video shot by the workers themselves in the documentary. When the workers provide the material, they also become participants in its creation.

This documentary gives the voices back to SMART and preserves SMART's group memory. It not only gives the group the right to be visible and respected, it also serves as a reminder of SMART's erased history and pain, of the indifference, arrogance and narrow-mindedness of mainstream society for so long. The simplest expressions of the SMART children are the most penetrating:

Sometimes it feels like the hair gives you a sense of courage. And in everyone's mind it's the bad boy, and the bad boy feels like he won't be bullied. Sometimes I would like to be a bad boy myself.

When I first left home I could only feel relief by styling me hair or by dressing up. I really want to style my hair in a way to attract people to let them want to be your friend, let them know you were special.Even if it was to yell at you someone is speaking to you. Even if some people didn’t like it, it didn’t matter.

I think I've been working in this factory for a decade I'm still an ordinary worker with no chance of advancement. But in SMART, I have a chance of advancing. First, I was already in a different space. In that space I could easily get status.I could become part of the SMART elite. Even though it was virtual, but virtual me was happy there. In the factory, if I cut my hair just like others I’m just another unknown line worker

Bibliography: Yifan,L.(2019)We Were Smart:Guangdong Times Museum

"Up to ninety-nine, down to just walking, Wuqiao played acrobatics, everyone has one hand." Wuqiao County is located in the southeast of Hebei Province, China, and is recognized as the hometown of Chinese acrobatics in the world. Wuqiao is known as the cradle of acrobatics in acrobatics circles at home and abroad for its long history of acrobatics and superb acrobatics.

"In Africa, there is no female rolling ring acrobat. My goal is to become the number one. I never feel bitter." Heikema, a 16-year- old from Ethiopia, was slightly shy, but sure. "When I was a kid, I watched movies and thought acrobatics were so cool. I really want to be someone with a stunt. I entered the Ethiopian acrobatics school at the age of 10 and I have been there until now." In the meantime, Heikema happened to see European actresses. She was deeply attracted by the rolling ring show she did not think much about, and she was determined to learn this stunt. "The opportunity will come soon!" Speaking of having won the opportunity to study acrobatics in Wuqiao, Heikema couldn't hide her excitement. "Many outstanding actors in our country have come to Wuqiao for further studies. Coming to Wuqiao to learn acrobatics has become a lot of people's interests. The dream, of course, includes me."

Considering that there is an age ceiling in acrobatics, Heikema intends to attend high school, enter university, and become a doctor or costume designer in the future. "If I have enough money, I also want to open an acrobatics school in Ethiopia."

Jon, a 21-year-old Tanzanian girl at the time, took a bus and entered Wuqiao in the pouring rain. Before this, she knew nothing about China. It is her mother who works for the Ministry of Culture of Tanzania, and she is very happy that Jon can come to China for further studies. Jon likes magic, and he often consults Chinese students majoring in magic at night. Her English name is Joan, but Chinese students call her "Black Girl" because "You are black and you look good." Jon liked this nickname very much. Jon said that when she first came to Wuqiao 16 years ago, the locals were "scared" of her. She was shopping in the county town, and people "all ran away". She went to the store to buy things, and some bold people came and asked her: "Can I touch you?" "Do you take a bath? Why does it look so dark?" Nowadays, locals are used to African faces. When acrobatics declined in China, it became a well-paid career choice in Asian and African countries. Red Mbas, an international student from Laos, started practicing acrobatics at the age of 9. He can get a basic salary of 2,000 yuan a month and has extra income from performances. In Africa, both acrobatics and circus are promising. He confessed that if there is no circus, he may be involved in gangs or drugs.

Bibliography:

1.http://www.wqzjdsj.com/ 2. http://ydyl.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2018/0731/ c411837-30180710.html 3. https://kknews.cc/world/q5985vo.html

Images: https://kknews.cc/zh-my/world/q5985vo.html

Drawing Power is more than an anthology; it's a manifesto of solidarity and empowerment of those who have lived and fight with trauma. Different voices meet together- sixty illustrators tell their stories of violence and sexual harassment through comics:

'Even now, years later...it’s still buried...it feels like there is no space to openly talk about it and move beyond it.'

'I was trapped in a cycle of abuse and the monster grew longer.'

'Only my rage felt safe now.'

'A constant state of panic & having to pretend it was all ok.'

' I haven’t changed much. I still play tough. I still keep my blue - collar roots, my love of sludge metal and old trucks, my boots and my bowie knife. it... sits in my purse now. I am afraid to go anywhere without it.'

'We were in a dictatorship. I couldn’t do anything, we entered an empty apartment, they took me to a room , they laid me on the floor and closed the door. I didn’t want to die or be hurt. So I didn’t defend myself, I closed my eyes and thought of something nice.'

'In half dream, I saw a group of unknown shadows surrounding me.'

Bacon took Three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion, painted in 1944, as the true starting point for his painting. From this painting onwards, elements recur in the picture that have become his hallmarks. One of these is the focus on the mouth. The mouth has metaphors for life, such as the Latin word "vagina dentata", which combines the female genitalia with the teeth. This image is also used as a metaphor in some modernist women's writing to illustrate that although men are more dominant and aggressive in a patriarchal society, eventually all will be embraced and swallowed up by women. In summary, the mouth has the meaning of fertility and primal desire. Bacon's obsession with the mouth came from Eisenstein's great film Battleship Potemkin of the screaming nanny, which he thought was the best depiction of the sound of crying. The mouth, as the subject of "crying", represents the panic in the face of violence, and at the same time, as the most mobile organ of the face, its movement is a deconstruction of the totality of the head. The mirror image of the human being is in fact a mapping of the head. So the deconstruction of the head can represent a deconstruction of the identity of the self. When the ego identity dissipates, the mouth is given a new direction. It is not a wail for fear or a scream for grief; it is a pleading cry to an empty self.

Bibliography: https://www.francis-bacon.com/francis-bacon-painting-philosophy-psychoanalysis https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/05/10/the-cunning-of-francis-bacon/

‘Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive’ introduces a number of unconventional archives and the process of how queer individuals and collectives critically engage existing archives, bring sensibilities to bear on archival projects, and figure out ways to document, preserve, and share their lived experiences through their collections. The chapter about queer zines offers insights into how ephemeral material can bring the community together.

Zines like Gerken’s and Keller’s exemplify the documentary record the co-founders and volunteers of the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) seek to preserve, and the kind of record they, and other participants in queer zine subcultures, encourage others to produce. (…) While most of the zine-makers I write about are in conversation with professional zine librarians and archivists, they have developed approaches to archival pedagogy outside of conventional, professional-institutional archival contexts and discourses. They develop their approaches in alignment with queer values, experiences, interests, and knowledges, and in doing so, create culturally-specific, situated archival practices. They make their ideological investments explicit, and find ways to translate these ideals into practice. In doing so, they enable the production of diverse queer historical record.

Queer zine archivists and creators articulate an archival pedagogy appropriate to the materials, subcultural practices, and experiences of queer zine creators (and related audiences — like drag kings and members of leather clubs). They educate in a variety of venues: online archives, zines, classrooms, conferences, workshops, museums, galleries, community spaces, and the archive itself. They invite learners to become archivists and documentarians, and offer tools to support these self-directed activities. By empowering members of their subcultures and communities to take on these roles, they create conditions for producing a diverse, inclusive historical record.(…)

Recall that, in In a Queer Time and Place, J. Halberstam observes that queer subcultures “tend to be documented by former or current members of the subculture rather than by ‘adult’ experts”.

Peony Gent challenges and pushes the boundaries of comics as a medium. She is inspired by unconventional comic artists like Aiden Koch and Simon Moreton and influenced by the modern feminist tradition of poetry (those such as Maggie Nelson and Holly Pester) that sees poetry about the self as an act of resistance.

'Park Bench Kensington combines illustration with printed text to recreate a conversation the author had with a stranger on a park bench, in Kensington. As she describes the encounter: “I was eating lunch when a man approached me and asked if I could take a second to talk for a bit. After we said goodbye, I wrote down every sentence I could remember him telling me, and turned it into this comic.'

'He talked to me about how he was currently waiting until 3pm where he had an appointment at the Bangladesh High Commission, where he was going to announce himself as an illegal immigrant within the UK so he could return home to his family. He told me about how hard it been living and working in London for the past 10 years, and how his illegal status had made it almost impossible for him to get well paid work, despite him being a talented chef. He had become very very depressed, and felt abandoned after his girlfriend of a number of years had left him. He also felt torn about returning to his home country, both looking forward to seeing his family whilst feeling sad about losing the freedoms London provided him. He was in a lot of pain, and hoped returning to his home would ease some of it.'

I wish you‘d leave Wissett and take Charleston...It has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely.

In 1916, at the age of 37, Vanessa Bell moved to Charleston which is close to the Sussex countryside on the recommendation of her sister Virginia Woolf. She was an English painter and interior designer, born in 1879, and is considered to be a representative of the Bloomsbury group.

Since she moved in, she has filled every corner with art ，

Vanessa and Duncan transformed the house into a living art installation. The dining room has black walls, hand-stencilled with pale squares and circles; upstairs, Grant painted Henry, the family lurcher, beneath a window. A bathroom became mint-green, a ceiling lemon-yellow and a dining table salmon-pink. Greek myths - from Arion riding a dolphin to Leda and the Swan - decorated chests and tables, while everywhere there were buxom naked figures.

It is art that has jumped off the canvas onto the things that you live with: walls, chairs, tables, cups.' It's easy to fall for the colourful disorder, the sense that art can bloom everywhere if only you let your imagination run wild.

Charleston demonstrates how art can be practically integrated into life and presented in the most everyday way. The whole house is her large canvas, unique walls, plates, bathtub make an otherwise deserted house the most charming place to be. It also naturally became a meeting place for the Bloomsbury Group, where writers and painters could meet, create and be inspired by this house. Charleston becomes an extension of herself, and anyone who steps through the door can instantly sense the owner's aura and artistic style.

“The show started as soon as I shut my eyes.”

“Dreams are fairy tales that we tell ourselves. They are the small and big myths that help people to understand. Of course, you shouldn't ask your dreams for instant or constant help in changing your daily behavior. And you shouldn't completely abandon yourself to the pleasure of this night spectacle. The insensitive dreamer risks spending his days doing nothing, surrounded by brittle, evanescent things. Sometimes people are so immersed in that reality they dream only at night-but by then it's too late for images.”

“According to an essay by biographer Tullio Kezich included with the recent release of Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams, he started it as part of his Jungian psychotherapy through the charting of these subconscious thoughts.The entries were garnished with pen and marker sketches and watercolor paintings. ”

I agree with the connection between Jung and Fellini, but I do think that the interpretation of <the dream book> is a very autonomous and indefinable affair in fact. For an artist, dreams are also a very important source of inspiration. He turns his dreams into words and pictures, and then into film images, which I think is a very wonderful thing. There is no order or structure to the dreams, they just come as they may. He had many strange and absurd dreams: having sex with all kinds of prostitutes, his wife dying of all kinds of strange diseases, himself getting all kinds of strange diseases, eating shit and chasing trains and so on. Fellini's films also embody this kind of experience by creating countless fascinating dreams for us with his camera. In< La Dolce Vita>, it starts with a picture of Jesus hanging on a plane,in <Eight and a half> magicians who can read the minds of others etc. It can be said that thanks to his unrestrained dream, we can feel this fantastic art works. It is very brave to record all dreams and show them to the world, and it is also very lucky to read the master's dream.

Illustration from <The Book of Dreams>:

In the context of the collective distortion of China's elderly population, Shanghai photographer Qin Xiao has inadvertently delivered an answer to elderly people's fashion attitudes, in the meantime using street photography to visually and honestly show the living conditions and wild fashion outlook of China's elderly. The elderly in his photos can be unkempt, rolling up their trouser and rampaging through the grocery shop, or modern and stylish, wearing floral shirts that the young can't manage and wearing socks with carefully selected patterns. Carol Tulloch in <the birth of cool> says that clothes reveal where people were, at a certain stage of life, and how they imagined themselves, how they became a person. These intriguing street photographs reveal old Chinese people's lives, which are constantly changing and difficult to summarize. That’s why viewers will feel amazing at the fashionable and rebellious spirit of the elderly as well as the richness of their lives. Influenced by anthropological photography and Alex Webb, Qin Xiao's photographs are an integration of personal and collective memories and life experiences, which, as he says, like the natural material that future archaeologists will be looking for. Those elderly people who walk on the streets of Shanghai's Jing'an district are easily ignored by the public, at least not as protagonists of artistic creation, but they are a dynamic representation of a generation's social life, and their clothing is a visual representation of their social identity. Such detailed, realistic recordings provide a peek for audiences to understand the lifestyles of the elderly. In contrast to young people, whose lives tend to be homogenized and who dress in increasingly similar styles, the diversity of older people's lives seems stimulating and even interesting.