Implement Aesthetic Education in Rural And Remote Areas
Xue Xue Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan. 2015-2017My Role: Colour Research Coordinator
With the aim of promoting Taiwan's cultural and creative education from the grassroots up, I had worked for two years in Xue Xue Foundation (Taipei, Taiwan) which launches a series of colour curriculums to schools in rural and remote areas where lacking of art resources and personally lead students to look for their cultural colours.
Team
Xue Xue Foundation
CEO: Esther Lo
Project Manager: Chih-Cheng Su, Yu-Jung Lee
Project Supervisor: Yian Chen
Research Coordinator: YingAn Chen, Ming Yu Xie
Photographer: Ching Tai Ho
Cultural Colour Collection
To enlighten children in seeking inspirations and to nurture the sense of colour in a cultural context, my co-workers and I lead the children in remote areas to identify with the nature, histories and buildings in search for their representative cultural colours. Children could not only be more acquainted with their hometown but could discover more Taiwanese culture itself and tribal histories as well.
Colour Observation & Creativity
In the class, they often told their local stories, which is the connection of colour and culture, and I was always amazed by their narratives or the meaning of the colour for them. Never did I teach them to draw eyes or a mouth on the prototypes during the colour painting courses, encouraged them to apply local cultural colours with creativity instead. For example, they drew various of landscapes or their traditional clothes and were fond of painting their future achievement on those prototypes related to their self-projection as well.
It was not just only teaching them about colours that we were also shared and touched by their precious histories and learning enthusiasm.
There has been over twenty thousand underprivileged children in Taiwan able to participate in series of aesthetic experiences, creative activities and art courses.
Children's Painting Exhibition
In a year and half period, I had have joined the exhibition planning for 7 children’s painting exhibitions around Taiwan with a team of 3 members. Among these exhibitions, the underprivileged children were subsidised to go to the local art museums to see their unique work. Because of living in remote areas, those tribal children have little chances to appreciate art in a museum, and with restricted resources to acquire art–related knowledge.
Cultural Representative Colours
Each school who has attended the program needs to search for the five colours to represent their own culture, tradition, or landscapes. Also, the students can realise that colours will tell stories and show people the uniqueness.
There has been over 100 schools and almost 7,000 students in Taiwan joined the exhibition so far. These plans have helped more than 10,000 underprivileged Taiwanese students in the past 7 years, and spread aesthetic education evenly and efficiently around the country.
Exhibition for the underprivileged children
Setting up over 1000 children’s work in every exhibition around Taiwan, we utilised distinctive ways to arrange the art work. They were displayed by school’s representative colours, or by colour order as a whole and showed their culture or terrain features. Through all the exhibition programs, the relationships between the local features and colours have been strongly connected to children’s perspectives; on the other hand, from visiting elementary schools in the rural and remote areas to exhibition planning, which has indeed helped people to embrace our unique features and proceed successfully in building the cultural identity in Taiwan.
