Culture/Tradition- Flags
Q: How does Korean flag communicates its culture and identity (cultural and historical identity) to people?
Taeguekgi
-a white background, a red and blue yin-yang circle in the center that symbolizes a balance, and four black trigrams in each of the four corners
-background symbolizes light and purity and reflects the Korean people’s traditional affinity for peace
Nature- Clouds
Q: Can cloud be considered as beauty? art?
René Magritte created a series of mysterious cloud related works that challenges the viewer’s perceptions of between reality and illusion. He described his paintings as “visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does that mean?’. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.”
One of his famous artworks, The Fasle Mirror, is an enormous lashes eye with a luminous cloud-swept blue sky filling the iris and an opaque, dead-black disc for a pupil.
Sources:
Documentary: Why Beauty Matters by Roger Scruton
When Scruton argues “beauty is not just a subjective things but a universal need of all human beings”, what he means that beauty is vital because it feeds the soul. According to the documentary, many experts would believe that the purpose of art is to make something beautiful. Human life is full of sufferings and people have remedy of this, beauty. Beauty brings enjoy and shows human life to be worthwhile.
Social Network- Instagram
Q: How much power does the social community have?
Q: How much influence does the instagram has on social community? Can SNS be used as one of advertisement methods?
On March 1st, my Instagram newsfeed was full of one thing: the flag of Republican Korea where I’m from and spent the whole years before high school. The date is a national holiday called Korean Independence Movement Day or Samiljeol that Koreans commemorate March 1, 1919, when we’ve finally proclaimed the independence from Japan after 9 years of its officially proclaimed annexation of Korea with severe and violent domination. While I’ve never paid that much attention to any national flag, not even to that of my own country, after I have thought about what does it actually mean by visual culture since I took this class, I suddenly wondered why and how flags were designed in those ways as well as what and how they convey and communicate the countries’ histories and cultures visually. To investigate this question, I decided to explore specifically flags of Korea and America to which my identity belong. My investigation for this semester is not only for myself to better understand the countries where I’ve spent my whole life and, especially and the true meaning of “visual culture” but also to commemorate Korean Independence Movement Day by figuring out how things are visually and culturally communicated in my three domains: the national flags, Korea, and the United States.
Sources:
Jenkins, Tom. “Is Instagram changing the world?” CNN. October 22, 2015. Accessed April 06, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/22/fashion/instagram-is-changing-the-world/.
“Instagram’s fifth birthday party had a guest list stretching to 400 million. That’s how many monthly active users the photo-sharing app now has and almost half of them are under 25.”
“The best Instagram accounts are aspirational, but they also tell a story.”
“Designers and brands are responding to a desire for storytelling, inviting their Instagram followers into a previously closed world. Show lighting and set design is planned with Instagram in mind and it’s now the place where trends become reality and model’s careers are made.”
“Art and fashion are gloriously intertwined currently, and Instagram is helping to open the former to a wider audience too.”
Activism: Social media by nature is a perfect campaigning tool and Instagram’s youthful demographic are more active than most, whether on wider issues in society (#ifttheygunnedmedown), or contradictory rules governing social media itself (#freethenipple).
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