Project 5: Mapping

For the Mapping project, I am investigating and documenting China’s College Art Test, which is the test that determines whether a student can go to China’s most famous art colleges such as the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Every year, tens of thousands of students go to art classes outside of school to elevate their skills for an average of 4 months just because they need to achieve the skill to get into the top art academies. The art education in China is very different than America’s. China’s art education focused so much on techniques that barely any creativity can be told from the students’ artworks. Most students can draw identically the same. 

This phenomenon is scary, considering the fact that art should be a creative process but Chinese art students achieve a level to “mass produce” artworks that are so similar that they almost look like the artworks all come from the same person. This phenomenon is the cruel fact that China’s art education somehow has suppressed the portion for creativity in making art. The system forges different children into the same type of machine. 

 

The mapping of the phenomenon is about documenting the art system in China that forces students to draw like the same and turning their creativity down. It is to document the standardized quality to be a “Chinese art student”. In the mapping process, images of students taking tests together would be collaged. The images would reflect the students being standardized like a box of paint being mass-produced by machines that their quality is alike and there is nothing surprising when seeing them. In the project, I am going to document AI’s fast development and morph it with the Chinese art students’ drawing behavior. It is going to be a drawing of a Chinese art student morphing into a robot (AI), symbolizing the Chinese art system is forcing the students not to show creativity in their art, in a way that the students are becoming more like AIs.