Wittenberg University Journals
Not a member yet
275 research outputs found
Sort by
Artworks
Get PDFDeanna Volz graduated Wittenberg University in 2018 with a major in Art and Japanese. Soon after she pursued a certificate in Children\u27s book illustration from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. Following her dream to live and work in Japan, she now works as an Assistant Language Teacher in Fukui, Japan where she helps students learn English with art and conversation. The following illustrations were created for Deanna’s Japanese thesis project
Tattoos in East Asia: Conforming to Individualism
Get PDFAlthough Japan, South Korea, and China share a similar history of tattoo criminality spanning thousands of years, in modern times they all hold different legal policies concerning the practice of tattooing. South Korea has the strictest laws, requiring a medical doctorate to legally tattoo, while Japan has only recently reaffirmed the legality of the practice outside of health professionals. China, on the other hand, has few restrictions on body art. This paper explores this interesting difference via observational fieldwork in the major cities of Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and Beijing as well as interviews with local people within and outside the tattoo scene. In doing so, this paper hopes to explain the connection between a new tattoo culture supported by a younger generation and the level of democracy and development of each country. Although a strong social stigma towards the art remains salient in all three nations due to the historical connection to criminality, a new, younger generation with greater access to the internet and the outside world has been able to adopt a tattoo culture unrelated to previous trends. Tattoos in East Asia are becoming less about rebellious self-expression, which could be threatening to authoritarian governmental systems like China, but are instead symbols of a modern society rising alongside a younger middle class, one unburdened by previous decades of poverty or struggle. The rising prevalence of a tattooed population may be less an indicator of a strong counter-culture then, but instead, a signal of a globalized, developed society
UNESCO State of Conservation: Chinese World Heritage Sites
Get PDFIn 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) met from October 17th to November 21st in Paris, France, to draft a treaty concerning the protection of the world cultural and natural heritage. This treaty sought to preserve the natural and cultural heritage of our planet by creating a list of properties throughout the world designated as having outstanding value to humanity. The states parties were instructed to nominate areas within their individual countries worthy of preservation to be listed on UNESCO’s “World Heritage List”. This treaty has since been ratified or acceded to by 194 countries, including the People’s Republic of China. China is a special case because this country has 55 individual sites on the World Heritage List, tied only with the country of Italy for the most in the world. However, previous research has shown massive increases in tourist traffic at World Heritage sites, as well as a growing number of environmental issues associated with tourism (Guo et. al, 2019). This paper affirms the existence of environmental and conservation problems at Chinese World Heritage Sites and offers evidence to suggest the problems stem from Chinese government prioritization of tourism revenues over conservation
Painting the Void: Chan Buddhism in Guanxiu’s Eighteen Luohan (Arhats)
Get PDFThroughout history, painters have turned to the major world religions for artistic inspiration, reifying the likenesses of deities and spiritual masters alike in an effort to capture significant historical moments or focus prayer and meditation. However, the strictly anti-logical, anti-verbal nature of Chan Buddhist religious practice seems to defy conventional approaches to painting; after all, the painstaking attention to physical appearance that characterizes so many historical artistic masterpieces is antithetical to the deeply incorporeal, spiritual transcendence to which Chan Buddhists aspire. Perhaps this seeming disconnect between the metaphysical nature of Buddhism and the necessarily physical constraints of artistic practice is the cause of the paucity of literature specifically addressing the creative translation of abstract Chan Buddhist ideals into concrete art objects. In this paper, I attempt to patch a hole in the canvas of religious art history through a close examination of the interplay of faith and ink in Chinese painter and Chan master Guanxiu’s “Eighteen Luohan (Arhats).” I begin by compiling a brief summary of the diverse and largely informal conventions of Chan Buddhist artistic production, contextualizing Guanxiu’s work not only as an aesthetic masterpiece formally befitting its cultural tradition but also as a groundbreaking meditative project. By introducing an interpretation of the titular luohan derived from dreams rather than human models and by defying the contemporary urge to portray spiritual mastery through secular notions of beauty, Guanxiu audaciously opens a pathway of communication between the spiritual and the mundane and creates a new artistic canon, that of the eighteen arhats. Finally, I argue that Guanxiu’s work, situated as it is in the elusive liminal space between spirituality and artistic practice, facilitates communion between the artist, the Buddha, the viewer, and the pictured arhats, assembling all parties in what might be imagined as a simultaneously earthly and divine correspondence between the physical world and the void
Exploitation Through Healing: Colonial Histories of Subjugation beneath Imperial Japan
Get PDFAssociations between medicine and healing are challenged through this investigation of Imperial Japan’s (1895–1945) history of implementing colonial healthcare. Through the lens of Foucault’s social theory term “biopower,” three focused inquiries (regarding economic history, social history, and women’s history) pertaining to Japan’s history of governing colonies serve to reveal and clarify complex networks of imperial intentions and outcomes, the colonies’ resistances and defeats, and the combined influences of Japan and its colonies over one another’s historical trajectories. Economic study reveals pre-imperial Japan’s biomedical, educational soft-power over China, positioning the nation for future conquests that implemented biopower. The colonies’ social histories reveal that Japan not only internationally imposed its own public health institutions to execute operations of biopower, but also that it appropriated institutions from native colony culture and used them to subjugate the bodies of colonial individuals and societies. The study of biopower over female bodies reveals the core sociopolitical sentiments which motivated and perpetuated Japan’s actions of forcible medical modernization throughout their half-century long imperial reign
Notes of a Desolate Man as an Act of Mourning
Get PDFChu T’ien-wen’s (朱天文) Notes of a Desolate Man is a montage of vastly different cultural references, where the authenticity of the floating, west-originated signifier repeatedly comes into question in its oriental context of Taiwan. The novel repeatedly includes names such as Eliot, Goethe, Montaigne, Foucault, Fellini, Levi-Strauss, Satyajit Ray, Ozu Yasujiro, the Bible, and references to Mao’s poetry. In my essay, I aim to answer the question: amidst the litter of references and quotes, where do we locate the author in the text, who seems to have created an inscrutable work of pastiche, and in which the different elements don’t seem to unify? Many scholars interpret the book in a Barthesian framework – the kaleidoscopic cultural references as the promiscuous expression of the main character’s homosexuality. Some Chu’s textual practice is political, aiming to “negotiate Taiwan\u27s cultural identity through the aesthetics of hybridity”, giving the postcolonial Taiwan its vitality with the erotic potential of clashing signifiers.
However, I disagree with this reading, for Chu Tien-Wen’s conservative politics disagrees with the vision of an utopia of hybridity. For her, the identity of Taiwan is not fluid but broken. Rather than advocating a concrete political vision or practice, I argue that Notes is about nostalgia and mourning Taiwan’s nationalistic past, as she emphasizes the importance of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History in the epilogue of the Chinese version. With writing, Chu T’ien-wen attempts to metaphorically reconstitute Taiwan’s the past through fragments, but also laments that futility of her attempt
