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October 14, 2006
Community and Life-Style
Several days ago, I went to “The Metropolitan Museum of Art”. It is an interesting museum tour. I saw a lot of works depends on different period and culture. Especially, “Arts of Africa, Oceania, And the Americas”, there represent a rich diversity of cultural traditions for three continents, and many islands. It’s relating to “A Native Community and its Life-Style”. All native tribes have their own motifs in the shape of spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. They own their castes or social hierarchy and displayed their rank by body paintings, or tattooed designs on both arms. As years passed, style, technique and inspiration had remained unchanged. They were practicing and empirical skill from generation to generation. Those paintings or tattoos had a much deeper significance influence by castes. For example, the nobles just wore paint only on the forehead, but common people wore paint on the whole face. In civilization, most people don’t wear paint on their face or body. However, the female present their beauty with their make-up and the male also show their power with tattoo on their arm or body. On the whole, we know that different natives have similar characteristic in their art works to present their community and their life-style, even though they locate at different areas, for instance, the north-west coast of Canada and archaic China.
Posted by Ya-Hui Fan at October 14, 2006 04:07 PM