East Meets West in the Art Room
SMIC Private School art teacher, Ameet Gill, readily embraces the challenge of understanding Chinese culture through art.
And she’s bringing that passion into the classroom.
Gill developed an innovative class project using art to bridge the ever-shifting East-West culture gap. Like culture, art doesn’t evolve in a vacuum or in one form or place and she wanted her students to start connecting the dots between cultures through their art. So Gill had her eighth grade class step back to the 19th century and study French Impressionism alongside Chinese art of the same period.
An international school audience would probably understand that art is global better than most, but as the students dove into the project they made some interesting discoveries. First of all, despite living in China, most of the students admitted to having written off China’s art as uninteresting and giving preference to the works of the West. Additionally, most couldn’t name a single Qing Dynasty artist.
“We never talked about Chinese stuff in the [U.S.]. It was on the other side of the world,” says Tara Shui.
Interestingly, the treatment of Eastern and Western art to which most of the students were exposed paralleled the treatment artists received in France and China. While French Impressionists were widely feted, 19th-century Chinese artists had to work much harder to gain recognition.
In groups of three, the students compared and contrasted the two cultures through researching the history and working with the painting styles themselves.
As the students examined each other’s paintings, listened to each other’s findings and took ownership in the project, they were surprised at how much their perception of art, culture and history had changed in only four class periods. “It became a larger than life project to them,” says Gill.
“Before, I didn’t take Chinese painting seriously,” says Aaron Wen, summing up his experience. “Now I can’t decide whether I like [the] Chinese [style] or Impressionism better. They existed at the same time in history yet they were so different in almost every single way.”
The project culminated in an art show earlier this spring where the students presented their research and paintings.
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