Objects:
• Evaluate personal values and paradigms around body decoration and physical beauty.
• Investigate how physical appearance affects definitions of identity and belonging.
• Analyze values and belief systems of physical appearance across cultures, sub-cultures and
generations.
Artifact: (Links to the original post)
This is a pretty attractive topic in my opinion. It has been so long that I have observed myself very carefully. I am a very “careful” man. I don’t talk that much, even with good friends or families. The reason is if they are my families or good friends of mine, they should know me very well and too much conversation just break this kind of relationship. I only chat a lot when something important happened. And if they are not my families nor good friends of mine, it is not worthy to spend time of both sides by communication. This is my life behavior and it is pretty strange. Besides that, I am qualified as a normal person. I like listen music, playing games with good friends and want to find true love in this unique life.
Haha, enough joke. Now let me observe what I am wearing. I am pretty casual about what I want to wear. When I want to go out, I wear the most comfortable clothes. By comfortable, I mean convenient to wear and nothing too strange looking and warm enough in winter or cool enough in summer. I prefer to wear the cloth with dark color. For example, in this term, I have been wore black t-shirts and dark blue jeans most of time. Until this point, my dressing is pretty normal. However, I also wear a black watch and a red bracelet. The watch is a present from my dad before I came to America the first time. I always wear this. I am not just treating it as a gift from an important family member but also a great tool to know time so I can manage things in order. And the red bracelet is from a really good friend. She delivered to me on my birthday last year and the reason she gave me that is because last year was a unique year for the Chinese like whose age is either 12 or 24 or 12*n. In China, there are 12 Chinese zodiac. Mine is horse. It rotates every 12 years and last year was horse year. The reason she gave me a red gift is because red present luck in China. This is just a wish me luck gift. I always wear this two gifts because they are really special to me. Mainly just because the person who gave it to me is important to me.
For using purpose, I wear watch mainly because I like to control time, but it doesn’t mean I manage time really well but I just believe time is important and I should try to manage it better. Secondly, I wear bracelet because I believe other people’s positive believing can impact me. In this way, I can be more positive. Since I am an international student, I left my family and old friends and come abroad to learn advanced knowledge so I can have a better chance to improve the quality of my future life. If I lived well in the future, it can means a payback for my parents in my opinion. My parents want to live better than everyone else. In China, it is normal that people want to compete each other, sometimes they even compete about their kids’ study ability because they think if you have better score your chance of having better future life is greater . However. in my opinion, this is really bad for the kids. It really limits the kids’ capability of thinking and creating, but I was living in that kind of environment. This really affect the way I dress myself. I wear dark color cloth and this means I don’t want to be noticed too much. By that, the chance of me being competing with other people is less. I don’t like to compete since I am scared of competing. Not because I might lose by competing but the process of competing left a shadow when I was a kid. Now think about it, the past 18 years I was in China really gave me some bad behaviors. It left me of not liking to talk to people and don’t want to get noticed by other people. This is the reason why I don’t talk too much to people even good friends or families. In some part of me, I scare to talk to them. I scare to let them see my weakness. It is pretty pathetic, but the good news is I am trying to make a change. I try to find interesting topics to chat with friends and parents so I can stay for chatting for a long time period. But, this is me. I analyze myself pretty deep and nice. I agree I learned a lot from finishing this essay.
Reflection:
After finishing this assignment, I kind of have a feeling of how to observe people and by observing, people’s dress and their body adornment like tattoo usually shows who they are, what their value is. The last assignment in unit 5 was to observe myself. And so I did. I watch myself, what I wear and how do I look. The deeper I analyze, the more detail I can tell about myself. Like my behaviors and habits. This proves that dressing and adornment have a big connection with human behavior. People actually show themselves by presenting what they wear. If you are careful enough, you can simply observe a person and guess what kind of person he/she is and where he/she is from, etc. People wear what they believe has value to them. Maybe the dress is beautiful looking, or maybe the ring is from family which is important to you. Everything you wear has a big connection about who you are and what you believe.
Goal of future:
In future, I should keep observe people and myself in carefully because I can learn some precious knowledge from it. The cloth we wear and the tattoo on our body always means something. It will show what a person’s valuation on thing is. So this will become a very important skill when it comes to society. I need to develop this skill and learn how to control it by observing how’s people dressing and logically guess what their believe is.
Bibliography:
Table of contents:
Artifact 1: Life of value.
Artifact 2: Is food an art?
Artifact 3:Observation of people.
Artifact 4: What is Art?
Artifact 5: Horror
Artifact 6: Creative Spirituality
Artifact 7: Technology
Artifact 8: Remixing Culture