Do children have the right to express themselves? Do adults listen carefully when they express them? If you listen carefully, what kind of cognition can adults get from it? Have we always underestimated the ability of children to express themselves, so that the world is full of noisy voices of adults, and the voices of children can hardly be heard, but adults love their children anxiously and long to see their hearts?
On the afternoon of January 15, 2022, the "2021 Beijing News Annual Reading Ceremony" was broadcast live on the whole network, and the "Childhood Art Museum" won the "2021 Beijing News Annual Reading Recommendation".
"Childhood Art Museum", by Li Jie, Lefu Culture | Beijing United Publishing Company, September 2021.
At the scene of the event, Li Jie, author of "Childhood Art Museum" and deputy director of Luhu A4 Art Museum, gave a keynote speech entitled "Children: A More Silent Majority". Li Jie told the story of the children curating at the "iSTART Children's Art Festival", and saw the delicate and incomprehensible childhood thoughts of children from their artworks, saying, "If we give children real rights, what will the world become?" "I probably work with 1,000 children a year to do exhibitions, and they refresh my understanding of children every day." In the process of working with children, he began to believe that as long as they did not simply see their creation as a "child's play", they had infinite possibilities.
The following is the content of Li Jie's speech at the "2021 Beijing News Annual Reading Ceremony". There are many stories of children mentioned in the speech in the "Childhood Art Museum". When these children's sensitivity to reality and the pursuit of imagination are clearly presented in this way, it also reminds us that there is much more that can be done when it comes to education.
Children: The more silent majority
My job is as a curator of an art museum, and I usually work with artists more, but in a very meaningful action, we turned our perspective to children.
The place where I work is in the art museum in Chengdu, called Luhu A4 Art Museum, it was built in 2008, this year there was a Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan, our venue was also affected to a certain extent, the director took a lot of local artists to the disaster site, where we saw the powerlessness of art, but we found that those children affected by the disaster especially need to be soothed by other things, so we found the possibility of using art to heal children.
Li Jie introduced Luhu · A4 Art Gallery.
Then we spent many years to do a lot of projects for children in mountain areas, for children in disaster areas, for many special children, and these projects have become one public welfare theme after another, but we always think about a problem, if it is just one sporadic story and event, it cannot constitute the thinking or action empowerment of such a masked group. So in 2014, the museum did a project called "iSTART Children's Art Festival".
This project is now in its eighth year, and each of the previous seven years has had a different theme that has helped us to re-see these obscured groups from a child's perspective. Just as we can only make these groups manifest in society through disasters or the plight of our children. For us, can the creation of art find new possibilities in children?
The theme of the "iSTART Children's Arts Festival" has been run for the past seven years. (This image and the following images are provided by the speaker.) ）
In the past three years, we have found that the children care about their reality, so they are all from the theme of the school.
Three school-related topics.
In different projects, we have gained a variety of creations from artists and children around the world, but in this we found that their voices still have a lot of translation, how to make their voices really expressed? We started a very interesting project for curators for children.
The story of Huang Yiyi and ants
Huang Yiyi
This little friend from Chongqing, named Huang Yiyi, when he participated in our little curator project, he was actually an isolated child, when he was in the workshop, not many people were willing to communicate with him, because everyone couldn't understand what he said, because no matter what topic was discussed, he couldn't say the topics that other children cared about: the climate of the world, including the emotional problems of children and parents... The problem he said was only two words "ants", because he was really observing ants every day at home, and when he was almost about to give up participating in the museum's project, I talked to him once and discussed with him the story of my failure to raise ants when I was a child, and he turned out to be like a mentor, taking me through four months of "ant cultivation" because he was really an ant expert.
I was shocked that he was not only able to identify ants, but also to keep them on the floor of his home. I found that his father was not a biologist, let alone a researcher of insects, his father just randomly searched the Internet for a few ant-related books that might be helpful to children, but these books were books for adults, and Huang Yiyi was stunned to look up the dictionary to read these books. Then he started making mind maps and started looking at ants.
Huang Yiyi made a mind map about ants.
This incident lasted for several years, and then his father observed that the child really changed, and relayed the child's question to the ants through Weibo to the famous entomologist Ran Hao. The teacher spent the night writing him a reply letter, sharing everything he knew with the child as much as possible.
Huang Yiyi finally learned that the project he was going to do in our art museum was an ant park, and he decided to challenge the museum, saying that he wanted to feed ants in the art museum, and he wanted to make a learning table about ants. At that time, 58 children in Chongqing participated in the curation, and this project was very interesting, and eventually became the most popular children's curatorial unit in the "iSTART Children's Art Festival" that year.
Here's a picture he sent me recently, a kid growing up, but he's really turning what was originally an interest, a thought that might be doused, into a very powerful hobby. I have no worries that he will give up studying ants in the future, and I think that no matter what he does, he can be as serious, focused, and persistent as he is studying ants.
Color and light in the eyes of a child who is obscured
There are many children in our art museum, and some children may be silent and completely unable to express themselves normally. For example, when we were doing this exhibition, we met Hu Jun, a teacher from Hangzhou Normal University, who showed us the stop-motion animation made by autistic children.
We know that children with autism have social impairments and expression disorders, but some children have similar levels of intelligence and creativity to normal children, except that they cannot make physical contact because it is almost an electric shock. But Teacher Hu Jun used a very interesting creative experiment, because children like animation, autistic children also like repetitive actions, he uses the principle of repetitive mosaics, tells children the rules of the game, each child can choose two colors, do animation in this grid, but to do six children together, they will definitely have social relationships in the process of doing, their hands will touch together, but they all want to complete an animation that requires cooperation. Every week they do this in a special children's school in Hangzhou, and after four weeks, these children can stand on the stage like I am today to share their PPT, and they can even high-five, bang their chests, and talk about their creative process very happily.
Another project in this exhibition: Children who are born invisible, how do they paint? We also help children come up with a hypothesis through a research project by Mr. Hu Jun, what would the foundation of painting look like if it were tactile?
We know that children who are born completely blind, they actually always learn Braille forever, there is only a point in their world, and they can only feel that point through touch, so as to feel the knowledge of the world and understand literature. So if the dots are connected into lines, will it help them to understand the body?
Children know the form by touch.
So they began to understand the form by touching, by carving lines on scaled paper, and after a few weeks, the children were able to sketch, imagine and create, and even some of them showed their talent for color.
We later found through brain science and optic neurology that most children just have their eyes close the window of life, but they have not lost the connection of the optic nerve, and their optic nerve is still developed. So in fact, through this project, we have seen another group of obscured people, and even found the original so-called visual arts, which can actually add a color and light to the world of the blind.
Gaga Cosmic Republic
Four years ago, there were three little girls, probably three little girls who were usually inconspicuous in school, and they sent me one of their books. They secretly worked on this book for three years, from the age of 9 until the age of 11, which recorded a fictional alien civilization they wanted to establish, called the Gaga Cosmic Republic. The duck-like republic is full of all sorts of things, their literature, their constitutions, their state bodies, their imaginations of laws.
I was particularly excited because my wife and I were the first adults to open this booklet, and even their parents and teachers had never seen it, because they found that the children's art festival projects that we do every year in our art museum are like a children's tree hole, and more and more children know that they can express their true thoughts and feelings here, and even get more social support, because children are a group that lacks public life.
These three girls joined the project of the museum, and through the platform of the museum, we recruited more than a hundred children from all over the country, these children are voluntary, they come from different schools, I don't know how they can connect together, and finally they set up a think tank and began to imagine everything here.
Map of the Gaga Cosmic Republic.
They had entrances to their country, and they also wrote a national charter in parchment, but in order for us not to understand, they designed their own writing, as well as their own territory and anatomical drawings.
Gaga Cosmic Republic's phonetic table and currency.
It took me a year to learn their grammar. At the same time, inflation in their country is still very serious, and I have seen them draw their own currency with pencils and signature pens. They also have their own myths, their histories, and their alien spaceships, as well as their television stations and television programs. They used a very magical self-organizing relationship, without much teacher guidance, and in just half a year, they created a cosmic guide about them, which was exhibited in our art museum.
The school of the Gaga Cosmic Republic.
This is the school they imagine their country, and when they really want to graduate in this school, they don't get a diploma, but jump from the roof of the school through that springboard to the stairs, but they won't fall to their deaths, because the downstairs is the water of forgetfulness, and this water will make you forget all the pain in the school and make you a new person full of beautiful imagination of the world. At this time, under the school, under this iceberg, is actually a laboratory, which absorbs the negative energy of all children and converts this energy into the motivation for the school to re-enroll.
I have never seen children at such a young age, in such a sharp but with a little bit of black humor, to calm down the real education they have experienced. But that's the child's perspective. They are also in the museum every day, and when they have free time, especially on weekends, they come to work to become ambassadors of their country. Each person has to answer eight questions in order to get their issued passport. The first question is whether the flag of the Gaga country is an egg or a duck egg. I found that 90% of the adults could not answer this question, they all asked for help from the children on the scene, and the children were like having passwords that they could understand each other.
Flag of the Gaga Cosmic Republic.
Over the years, every year we may receive thousands of children with all kinds of ideas, and we will incubate more than 150 of them, almost thousands of children involved. The project has touched 26 cities, more and more children, including special children, mountain children, rural children, urban children, public school children, private school children, they are all involved in this activity, at the opening time, they have completely ignored who is the host on the stage, who is the audience offstage, they have directly stood on the stage.
I wrote these stories of children into the book "Childhood Art Museum", and many chapters in it remind adults that we lack a child's view, a child's perspective, and our society is too short of voices from the future. If we don't look at children from the perspective of children, we can't inject more possibilities into the future.
Speech | Li Jie
Text collation | Shen Chan
Edit | Li Yongbo Qingqingzi
Proofreading | Liu Jun