"In the future, when these children make choices, they will recall some interesting things they did in the art museum as children, believing that they can actually be respected, that their voices should be heard, and that they should choose the path they really want to take."
This article was first published in Southern People Weekly
Text / Southern People Weekly reporter Meng Yiyi sent from Chengdu
Covering an area of nearly 3,500 square meters, Luhu · A4 Art Museum is located in Chengdu's Tianfu New District, nearly 20 kilometers away from the main city, and it is not bustling on weekdays, but every year from August to October, it will be like a festival, and children who have just taken summer vacation have endless exchanges with their parents. "You'll find that the atmosphere of the whole museum is changing." Li Jie, deputy curator and chief curator, said he wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses, was tall and talkative, and was called "Uncle Popcorn" by children because of his curly hair.
Since August every year, the A4 Art Museum has opened the iSTART Children's Art Festival as scheduled, and has entered its ninth year since the first edition was held in 2014. Unlike most domestic exhibitions, iSTART is like a strange seed, where children and adult artists have the same right to think and act. They said they wanted to build a "cosmic republic," so they built a cosmic republic, they made movies of children under the age of 13 taking over the earth, they talked about movement, the Cold War, school bullying in forums, they looked at themselves and they looked at the world, "Why do some of the ideas and ideas that I talk about at that time that were not very profound at that time have the audience 'wow'? The point is why did this group of adults in 'Wow' not understand the implicit information and thinking in The Age of the Prophets, thinking that I was too young to think of it and not 'over-interpret'? Wu Liancheng, a 14-year-old child who looks quite precocious, said. Age of the Prophets is an animated work for children.
Giving children a voice is often seen as an action for children's empowerment.
Children have long existed in adult society in a marginal form, receiving a lot of love and bondage as appendages. It was not until schooling gradually replaced apprenticeship as the main form of education that the concept of children and empowerment began to develop gradually, and it has only been more than a hundred years.
However, "schooling in a sense reverses the situation of the family as the only means of education for children, and human society gives children new social roles: learner, object of investment in the future, and use it as the common property of society ... Childhood, on the other hand, became a long-unpaid internship to earn a place in the shrinking middle class. Li Jie wrote in the "Childhood Art Museum".
"We have to inject some variables, and we can't let a society be too monolithic and solidified." Li Jie thought that the non-profit art museum may be able to assume the role of folk education in part.
"Plant Wonders" in 2011, "∞" Children's Art Exhibition in 2013, "The Incredible World" in 2015, "No Big, No Small World" and "Another World" in 2017, "Childhood Sanatorium" and "Little Bang" in 2018, "Secrets of Childhood" in 2019, "Do it" and "Action School" in 2020, "1001 Game School" in 2021... To date, iSTART has exhibited more than 3,000 works, 8,000 children and more than 100 artists per year, and nearly 600 public education activities.
Nowadays, many cities have begun to organize children's art festivals, such as O'Kids in Chongqing and Bang in Shenzhen! Children's Art Festival, Xiamen's TCCAKids artists, and some peers approached Li Jie and asked if they could take iSTART on a tour, which was not an easy task, "The biggest problem is that we want to respect every child." Li Jie said, "We have to tell every child why he brought his work to that city, to sign an agreement with every child and family, and adults is a standard, you can't underestimate it because it's a child's business, I think it's a child's thing, so we should pay attention to it." For all the experiences and processes they go through are an enlightenment, let them know that they are the subjects of power. ”
In addition to the daily exhibition management, Li Jie spends one-third of his time every year planning iSTART, selecting, tracking and discussing from 5,000 registered children and more than 100 projects, and finally co-creating with about 1500 children, completing more than seventy projects.
"The workload is pretty scary." Li Jie seemed to have just realized this matter and seemed to be tired of it.
The following is Li Jie's self-statement:
Disaster as enlightenment
The Wenchuan earthquake of 2008 shifted Chengdu from a small civil society to a civil society to a certain extent. A few days after the earthquake, taxi drivers began to send supplies to the disaster area for free, and as long as those who were able, such as those who had learned first aid, were willing to go over, we developed empathy in the process of fighting natural disasters — an enemy or imagined enemy — it was a process of awakening and enlightenment, and became the capillaries of society rooted in the community.
The A4 Art Museum was also severely affected by the earthquake and was forced to close. Curator Sun Li took the team and artists to the disaster area to see what could be done to help the children who had lost their loved ones. In that kind of scene, art is very weak. Children have expressions written all over their faces, but they don't need to express themselves in an artistic way.
In the next five years, we continued to work with NGOs to do rural public welfare activities and do art healing, and the curator once felt that we were too involved, so I continued to do it with NGOs in my personal capacity for two years. Slowly I realized that maybe the problem was in the city. In the case of the division of the sense of value in the countryside, the city has "original sin", which is like a powerful magnet that sucks everything away, never considering the other.
But then I corrected some ideas, because I found that when dealing with children as a group, cities and non-cities are actually the same, and we don't see many "children", simply put, children have no rights. Children living in the city do have good material conditions and educational opportunities, but they cannot talk casually in school, they must only promise, they are wrapped up in a vain so-called value of success, and they cannot even come into contact with nature.
Since you can't intervene and change the countryside well, don't consume them. In some ways, cities may be able to provide the opposite power. So we went back to the city to do children's art festivals.
In fact, in addition to the curator and me, including many colleagues of the art museum, cooperative institutions, schools, government departments, and educators, although they feel very good, they also have concerns, such as whether this model can be sustained. Will these exhibitions change the seriousness and scholarship of contemporary art museums? Would artists simply be reluctant to participate in such projects? Who wants to invest money? What do you really want to do?
I also often ask myself these questions to remind myself that I can't fall into a narrow situation, but in fact, I can't clearly answer the "stakes" and "motives" in them.
We just think that we should look at children's problems from the perspective of children, to understand what kind of existence future generations of mankind really exist. Sometimes when I confront children, I imagine them as aliens, we don't really know them, but they're all around us; we used to be them, and now we're trying to make them all the same as we are. Actually, they're still there, very different from us.
I often say that it is to empower children, but I don't really like the word "empowerment" because it is still the superior to the inferior. But I can't find a better word, because in the structure of the whole world right now, we simply don't know where "children" are.
First of all, we must first become partners, adults must talk less, let children talk more.
Tell the grown-ups that I have gone to the Republic of Gaga
Originally, the exhibition of adult artists and children in iSTART was divided into two parallel exhibitions, because adult artists have more experience and views, and children's things are very interesting, but too much is too complicated, and it will be a bit of a loss to put together. But the energy of the children continued to explode, and until 2017, I felt that there was a reversal.
That year, three little girls asked my wife to deliver me a small purple book with a lock. Listening to my wife, these three children have secretly used extracurricular time to pass on this little book since the age of 9, and in three years they have created a virtual "country" from outer space, the "Gaga Country".
I was particularly shocked when I first got that book, there was no one to guide them, there was no framework, they wanted to write where, like a literary narrative. The "National Guide" was full of pages with catalogs: inhabitants, ranks, festivals, amulet legends, national anthem, laws, dreams, customs... In the hierarchy of the Gaga country, the higher the number, the lower the rank, so "Hanako" is the highest status, and the "president" is the lowest person.
▲Luhu Lake· At the opening scene of the 3rd iSTART Children's Art Festival of A4 Art Museum, artists of all sizes took turns to give speeches on stage, and the small audience could not wait to go on stage to listen, 2017 Photo/ Luhu · Available at the A4 Gallery
I almost respectfully invited these children to participate in iSTART, and together with the art institutions to prepare the "Gaga Cosmic Republic" project team, 150 children signed up to participate, as the first "national think tank" to participate in the more specific "national construction", I also participated in the process of building their imaginary kingdom.
They are good at what they do, some children like money to create money, a child with good design skills design language. They also have a national charter, which begins by saying that the Gaga state is a constitutional monarchy of the universe, and I say that this is not a very contradictory state? They asked me back, how do you adults get the national system to get over so many kinds, you are so stupid, you don't have imagination. We are using every day to prove which is the best, but we never think about what else could be better.
There is also a school in the country called The Hogar School, where children graduate by jumping into the water – before there have been some student suicides in the country – and all the complaints and negative energies of the children who jump into the clear water will be absorbed, and their next life will become easy and happy. In fact, it is a problem in their hearts, they will think about this problem when they hear those news, and they have to have a space for discussion.
▲ ZM Art Education Students Collectively Create "Hogar School", 2017, ZM Art Education Collection 7 Photo /ZM Art Education Provided
In fact, many people may have such a book when they were young, and after many years, either they don't know where the book goes, or they feel that they were naïve before. We missed a lot of things.
In fact, the Gaga country is still evolving, and now this group of children and the earliest children may not imagine the same thing, and even have iterations, such as fan comics and secondary creations. We never think that children's growth and learning can actually be derived from the activities of other children, we always think that they have to learn adult things, why can't the culture of their peers become their culture?
▲ Gaga National Flag, 2017 Photo/ZM Art Education Provided
Our children's literature really deserves to be given to children. Last year, a little friend Lorrie did a "man catch the wind" project, it is not a limb game so simple, is a child and three adults to play, one person plays the person, three people play the wind, there is the east wind, the south wind, the north wind, there is no west wind, anyway, I don't know why there is no west wind, every time the wind is caught, I have to tell people, what kind of wind I am, and then what kind of wind. In fact, every time four people play it is a poem.
Last year, there was also a group of kindergarten children who refused to participate in iSTART, they said they didn't have any ideas, they didn't know what to do, they asked if they could mention something they didn't want to do, and we said yes. They offered to be an "anti-sleep coalition" because they didn't want to take a nap at school, which was so annoying. We asked the school teachers to collect what they were thinking when they didn't want to take a nap, and finally they made a 3-meter-high bed and put it on the wall, and made a projection of the children's ideas on it, so that they could interact. You will see a cow, the cow is constantly close to the screen, getting bigger and bigger, you can see the words on the black spots on the cow, the words "eat ice cream" and "go to the zoo", and finally the cow explodes, and the black spots fly away.
What these children want to say is that adults are cows that blow through the skin.
Every project like this is full of whimsy.
I often interact with children when I work on these projects, but instead of imitating their so-called childish tone, I talk to them in the same way as ordinary people. One reason why children are ignored is that adults always feel that they are naïve, making unreasonable trouble, either angry or coaxing, in fact, it may be that adults can't keep up with their thinking. Talk to your child more quickly because you have to be patient with capturing and responding to many of their messages.
Many of their ideas tend to be penetrating. I was always busy the year before and last year, and sometimes I had to work overtime when I got home. One day my son saw me typing at work before going to bed, and he said he wanted to try typing too, and then he climbed up and crackled for a while, saying, you guys are so lonely. He stood in front of me like a saint and knocked on me.
The courage of the crows
Children cherish their own voice opportunities.
In 2020, there is a group of high school sophomores and senior high school children, these children because they want to take the college entrance examination or go abroad, parents rarely agree to them to participate in the project, but they feel that they are not to participate in iSTART for themselves, but to represent a group.
They used their spare time to do questionnaire research, self-taught statistics, visualized the survey results, drew design drawings, arranged the exhibition site, and finally ran out of money, and used a marker pen to write the words on the wall.
The whole project, called "Crow Drinking Water," discusses privacy, love (their survey shows that 93 percent of high school students believe that schools should agree to their love), rights, parental will, and more. The small curators set the team's slogan as "Stay sober, stay cool", and they wanted to show "even if the sky is full of docile and similar white pigeons, be a crow with personality" and "uphold the most authentic self, find the most real world".
By the second year, the epidemic situation improved a little, and those issues became actions, with a larger classmate running to Guangzhou to investigate the problem of African-American workers, and a girl group that paid attention to the physiological hygiene of female medical workers in Wuhan and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to send them physiological supplies.
These real processes are very important to them.
▲The 6th iSTART Children's Art Festival "do it" theme exhibition, "Salute to the Red Things" scene, Luhu · A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China, 2020 Photo/Li Jie
Many children have been participating in iSTART for several years, such as a child named Wu Liancheng, who we first found in an animation production project. Although his painting professionalism was not outstanding, in the end, because of his excellent eloquence and screenwriting ability, the children elected him as a director in the process of democratic election. After he was selected, he proposed to make the remaining 46 children assistant directors, which means that there is no competitive strategy to continue the ideas of adults.
He later made a very interesting script "Cosmic Education Conference": the Cosmic Education Alliance invited representatives of earth's schools to participate, and the principal of one of the schools also went, where he understood the "spirit of innovative education", so he returned to spread and practice in the school. Fang thinks that school should be for the children, decentralized – something I often discuss with them – but what to do? Then choose the "principal" among the children. But the selected child is not obedient and cannot be manipulated by him, so he wants to elect his son, at which time another child jumps out and says that he also wants to run. So they had a square brain shell and a round brain shell, one followed the traditional model of the principal's father, and one thought about how to be happy and how to learn the real thing, and arranged a lot of cooking classes and music lessons. Wu Liancheng said that our school is "one school, two systems", how interesting.
Children see the world as a whole, because they are not yet bound by the structure of knowledge, so they see a lot of things very essentially. I'm not trying to elevate children to think that they are omnipotent, that adults are narrow-minded, but that we underestimate many of the possibilities of humanity in the initial stages. In order to inherit the existing structure and culture of mankind, we shape our children into successors, and this succession thinking limits the possibilities of the future, and in fact, there can be more wisdom.
▲ Chen Yidan (13 years old) "Gaga National Anatomy", 2017 Photo/ZM Art Education Provided
The children carried a tree
Most people recall the carefree life of their childhood, they are very yearning, and they feel like they are on a train, knowing that they can't go back when they get on this car, and the train has been running at a high speed towards an end point. But I understand that it is possible to go back, at least in many stages.
Every year I go to schools and communities to do a lot of sharing and communication. At the end of an online book club, a parent suddenly said that she wanted to make a vacant lot in the alley of the community into a "children's art museum." Another parent shared that many children in the community like to go to her house to play, and one day, this group of children carried a tree, the tree was particularly long, and the corridors were scratched. The children carried it in and said it was a gift for her, put it down and smiled and left. I asked her what she was going to do in the end, and she said she actually hung the tree in her house and walked through the living room and dining room, because it was so long, four or five meters, that the chandeliers in the house couldn't be used. The family was speechless about her, but every day when she saw the tree, she thought of the children's love and trust in her.
Maybe these kids and parents don't have an art gallery, but I think they do the same thing I do. Children and adults are the main body of each other and give each other nourishment. These adults are being healed by children, and this society is also being healed by children.
We often discuss whether there is a wall between art and the public, and whether art needs to go deep into life and form a whole with society.
When I was in college, I felt for a while that my artistic creation was in a state of self-talk, and when I graduated, I was very confused, as if because my family was learning to draw and be a teacher, so I chose to paint as an inevitable. I thought, why do you want to paint? Then I started to draw on the palm of my hand every day, washed and washed every day, and painted for more than half a year. That gave me a particularly real experience, that is, the first time I walked into my own heart, the palms are connected to the whole, the palm prints of people change every day, you can feel your emotions, it is a strong sense of life creative experience.
Then I felt like I was going to go out of my own world, to meet different people and draw their hands. I go to people who have a job and a hand, and 60% of them will refuse. I only have a small brush, choose the colors that a few people have, flesh, white, black, red, cyan, a painting is two hours, sometimes I wait for them to leave work during the day, and when it is dark in the evening, I finish painting, exchanging stories, and then photographing them. Did you know that the hands of the kiln workers were like babies, super thin and super elastic, and the paint was drawn as if they were painted on rice paper; the hands of fifteen or sixteen-year-old girls in the textile factory were like those of a 60-year-old woman, their cocoons were as high as spirals, and the paint often could not be painted.
I've been doing this for almost five years, and I find myself specifically wanting to generate artistic creation through communication, or to get communication through art, to do creative things with everyone. I now do the exhibition neither as a curatorial exhibition nor as an artist's work, this is not my work, it is the common work of everyone.
The art museum can shift the focus on things to the focus on people, forming a common memory.
It can also have a strong public character, and in the matter of children's education, although the civil power is very weak, it must do something. The museum does a little thing that overflows its own boundaries, and when it overflows, it will find that there are no walls, and all relationships are connected like water.
In the future, when these children make choices, they will recall some interesting things they did in the art museum as children, believing that they can actually be respected, their voices should be heard, and they should choose the path they really want to take, so it is very good, right?
▲ In 2005, Li Jie was painting in her palm in her mother's classroom. He has drawn and conversed with hundreds of people during his 5 years of wandering
Necessary for daily and continuous purposes
I do these things a lot of influence from my family, my grandmother and mother are both teachers, knowledge and action are one, very good to the children.
When I was in elementary school, there was a classmate in our class, and he always had a stinky smell on him, so he would be discriminated against and isolated by the children. One day I told my mom about this confusion, and I remember my mom asked me a question at the time, so would you like to play with him? I said I would. My mom asked why, didn't you say it yourself that he would have a stinky smell on him? I said that once he stood in front of me when I was being bullied, and I was grateful to him. I also talked about some of his other strengths, and my mother asked me again if I would like to be friends with him. I said yes, but I didn't dare, I was afraid that after making friends with him, everyone would isolate me. And then my mom said, well, if this guy is a good guy and he needs friends, and you need friends, then you can be friends with him, which means you're actually going to do what you think is right.
The feeling of doing iSTART is also, I think we are not trying to do a thing right, but to find out that doing a good thing.
Children's voices cannot be heard only through their suffering or through the slogans of adulthood, they should be everyday, concrete, and continuous empowerment.
iSTART is going to hold its eighth edition this year, and we have set the theme as "There is no game museum". Good games can explore themselves, create rules, worldviews, and constantly try and make mistakes — which is already rare. People are busy as a whole now, and to solve the problem of survival, they still have to succeed. After the internal volume, the value convergence, the social structure is reduced, and the urban culture is like a desert, where people can only eat, earn money, and then survive every day. Everything seems to be urgent, and something must be done. But the more nervous a society is, the more it suffers from gains and losses, and the more it cares about one or the other. Children growing up in such an environment are bound to be anxious. What happens when these children reach the age of 40?
But what kind of person children want to be, they need a lot of experimentation, they need a lot of room for trial and error.
Pediatrics is not just about studying children, it's also about studying humanity as a whole.
We don't want to see the next generation of people who behave rigidly, talk routinely, and are spiritually deserted, but we want them to be confident, empathetic, professional and cooperative, and tolerant. In unfamiliar and complex environments, they are willing to make friends, willing to look at the needs and opinions of others, see the difficulties of real life, see people and non-people in need of help, can also provide shoulders for others, and will also use creative perspectives to find new solutions. There must be people who can make the world a better place.