Last May, I bore my first child. Customers of my moms store gathered on the video call screen to celebrate and encourage when they heard her invaluable only daughter married a foreign man and gave birth to a baby. Both my mom and I were having big smiles throughout the call because of the warm words of blessing that they gave over the phone even though wed never met each other before. But last week, when my baby turns four months old, people began to say this. "Oh, I heard that the baby's father is a foreigner, but her face is white." (My husband is Arab and his skin color is similar to ours), "Your grandchild must be popular when she goes to school" Multicultural children, who have dark skin are usually being bullied at school." I faced elder prejudice against multicultural families in their worries and concerns. That was reality. Every time people say that I saw an uncomfortable smile on my mother's face. The mother of three years ago agreed to marry, saying now Korea is a developed country so theres no problem living as a foreign son-in-law in this society. Unlike what she said at that time, I can see her face which was full of worries through the smartphone screen. I wanted to say, theres still a lot of racism in Korean society. As a multicultural family, we should now try to eliminate discrimination one by one.
So I decided to work as a multicultural instructor. Its because I wanted to help find a solution to the reality of reverse discrimination around my family and neighbors. One of the educational goals that can be done as a multicultural instructor majoring in design is To cultivate multicultural sensitivity through works of art. The artwork itself has no answer because even if the intention of the artist looks different from the viewer's point of view, it is also shared with other viewers as one of the answers. No one insists that the 'different look' is not the answer the artist wants. If so, it wont be art anymore, just 'design' to meet only the needs of customers. A multicultural society is also in the same vein. The phrase "Koreans are a unified nation" is only being gradually erased by words, still deeply rooted in our perception. I would like to refer to all media that generalize "Koreans are like this" as "K-Needs (Demand of Single-National Koreans that already have their answers, neologism) Id like to take an example of an artist's work and how much this idea only demands narrow and confined answers from us in the present era.
Pablo Picasso, the master of Spanish creative art. His work is full of uncomplicated expressions.
This work, "The Maidens of Avignon," looks bizarre in a way, sad in a way, and difficult in a way.
Do other people feel the same way as I feel and think? When I show this work to an adult art class and ask them to name it, students say these thoughts. "Scary," "Lonely Hearts," "Lonely Women," "Women's Bath," "People in My Department After Work," etc. The various thoughts of adults are revealed in funny and sad reviews that reflect reality. On the other hand, in the after-school art class at the elementary school, "Mannequin made of colored paper," "Body competition," "God-made masterpiece," and "Spoiled art homework by my younger brother"... Children's interesting imagination unfolds in their own way.
I want to ask.
Is there a title called "Wrong Answer"?
Or is there definitely a "correct?
The painting, which cannot be objectively said what it was painted at once, stems from Picasso's memory in a brothel on Avignon Street in Barcelona, Spain. If he had just painted the image of prostitution, Picasso would have painted only realistic paintings like other artists, and there would have been no art philosophy called Cubism. However, he took out another invisible cross-section and expressed it on the canvas. Therefore, a work that would be strange in some ways, but in some ways, it cannot be concluded that it is strange, was created. Who dares to think, the minority was the beginning of a creative perspective that reverberated through the art field (realism was mainstream in that era)? Furthermore, contemporary viewers who look at this work think that each cross-section constitutes a three-dimensional body. The cross-section is neither correct nor wrong. That thinking can be an inspiration and hope for someone!
Then we can think of it from another opposite perspective. What if it is an art that pursues only unity except than diversity? We can find the example very close but distant country, North Korea. After liberation, North Korea's art is based on Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-un's self-reliance ideology and social realism. There are other communist countries such as the Soviet Union and China, but North Korea's modern art is thoroughly aimed at "unification" by national leaders. This is because pursuing various creative works is against the ideology of the country. Therefore, they should follow the guidelines set by the leader, not freedom of expression. 77 years after the division, only the natural environment of North Korea and the greatness of the head of the country are in the works of prominent North Korean artists. What is the art that they truly pursue, weighed down by the social system?
The value of diversity in artworks cast a message on the direction of Korean society with diversity that we should seek. Of course, it cannot be said: a healthy society with only diversity. We should make a three-dimensional Korean society that all members of society can share their side with sympathy like in Picasso's work, where each cross-section is gathered and three-dimensional, and everyone can own their color and cooperate without discrimination.