Blog 2 – Themes reflection
All three Better Lives themes are crucial in understanding how to face today’s society as an artist or a designer who produce product and art around the world. However, in this blog post, I will focus on writing about “diversity” in my theme reflection.
Diversity means “Understanding that each individual is unique and recognizing our individual differences. These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies. It is the exploration of these differences in a safe, positive, and nurturing environment. It is about understanding each other and moving beyond simple tolerance to embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of diversity contained within each individual” (Queensborough Community College, 2020)
Recently, ‘cultural appropriation’ is a frequently argued topic in the fashion industry. It comes down to ‘the use of one culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals or technologies by members of another culture regardless of intent, ethics, function or outcome’ (Kirkland, Representation, 2020) It is clear that there are rising incidents of cultural tone-deafness emerging more and more in today’s fashion industry.
Before the lecture, I never heard about the phrase `cultural appropriation’ before entering my current course. There is a statistic of my country’s population’s nationalities. In Japan 98.1% is of the population is Japanese, 0.5% is Chinese and 0.4% is Korean. Then there is about 1% of people that are from somewhere else. (Japan Ethnic groups – Demographics, 2016)
However, nowadays the number of foreign national workers has been drastically increasing, especially in Tokyo, yet the majority of the ethical group in Japan is Asian. There is a common idiom that reads “All Japanese are mentally middle class”. Japan used to have different castes before the second world war, but nowadays, there are no longer any castes that exist in Japan.
From my experience, before I went abroad to the United Kingdom, I hardly ever had a chance to associate with different ethnic groups of people, the background would help me to be less ignorant about cultural consciousness back then.
Attending Teleica Kirkland, Representation lecture was significantly helpful to deepen my understanding of the theme and it was also able to broaden my view. She said: “Designers and promoters still use racially insensitive images and doses outrage marketing under the guide lack of understanding to sell their products”. Even though fashion should be addressed without any restraints because it is a form of art, it still should not be acceptable to misrepresent cultures and society in a deliberate manner.
I learned from the lecture that I should be conscious of different cultures during my next projects and products. I should always make sure to do enough research so I do not appropriate other’s cultures in a way that might make a viewer of user of such a project or artwork uncomfortable. Even when it is simply inspiring. In my 3D effect course, we mainly create character designs for puppets props and costumes based on scripts or other narratives. So it is essential for my work to understand cultures on a deep level so that I can avoid ignorance and tell facts based on the history of a culture to the world.
Reference
Qcc.cuny.edu. 2020. Queensborough Community College. [online] Available at: <https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/diversity/definition.html> [Accessed 6 May 2020].
Indexmundi.com. 2016. Japan Ethnic Groups – Demographics. [online] Available at: <https://www.indexmundi.com/japan/ethnic_groups.html> [Accessed 8 May 2020].
19/20 Better Lives Lecture 10 Representation