South East Asian Art_BP#2 - Imani Burke

Pre-Colonial SouthEast Asian Art

Imani Burke

Pre-colonial art in SouthEast Asia was thriving with many religious influences including Janai, Islam, Catholicism, and Christianity. South east Asia contains Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines. But technically the Philippines wasn't referenced until much later on and was the only country in that region that did not have an influence with Hinduism of Buddhism.

The Philippines was colonized several times by the Spaniards, Americans, and the Japanese. During the Spanish occupation, there was a vast change in religion, art, and music. The Spanish occupation ruled the Philippines from the beginning of the 16th century to 1821, which is a pretty huge time period for the merging of cultures and beliefs. Magellan led the first Spanish invasion and took control of Cebu, but quickly met his fate on the island of Mactan, then later succeeded to continue Spanish rule.

Prior to colonization Filipinos were skilled in agriculture, martial arts and weaponry, education, mining, and art. When it came to agricultural knowledge, these individuals relied on more on swidden agriculture rather than intensive permanent agriculture. In the Vasayas, the staple crop is rice, millet, bananas, and root crops.

  
    The Filipino Golden Age - Royal Codex

Gold became a huge part of the trade culture throughout the islands and quickly began sought out for by the occupants. Mining in the Philippines began in 1000 B.C and contained gold, silver, iron, and copper. It is shown in the Boxer Codex that the original members of the Visayas and Luzon used these lavishes to decorate, it was worn, and it was also used a form of currency. Since gold was readily available throughout the islands, it started to become as idolized as a symbol of power to individuals marking their status. In the rise of mining, art became an influence to the practice of making by emersion of  dagger handles, tooth plating, ornaments, and gold dishes.

Pre-colonial Filipinos made successful armor that was used on the battlefield including swords which is important to native weaponry. In other islands of the Philippines its found that their armor was made from a variety of materials including bamboo, tree bark, shark skin, and water buffalo. These natives where also known to used round bucklers, breastplates and padded armor, caribou horn corelets, Chinese peak helmets, and lastly the Japanese katana. The armor gave them advantages when it came down to tactic and strategies for combat warfare, but it was unsuccessful when their invaders learned that ambush and surprise raids.

The Boxer Codex












Kossak, Steven, and Edith W. Watts. The Art of South and Southeast Asia: A Resource for Educators. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.

“The 19th Century.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., www.britannica.com/place/Philippines/The-19th-century. Accessed 11 Oct. 2023.

    


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century - Violet Larimer

Image
 Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century Summary: The Bauhaus school, was an art and design school established in Weimar Germany in the early 20th century that, according to the thesis of the documentary, defined and codified the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of art and art academia of the 20th century and into the contemporary world. The Bauhaus School was situated as an Avant Garde model to the established pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of the previously established art academy. Instead of learning a cannon and participating in rote tasks; students would learn the building blocks of art and design as a "grammar to visual language." Paired with the workshop structure of teaching, the school was an obvious break from tradition. On a more philosophical and ideological level, the students and teachers had broken down conventional power relations, with students pursuing personal projects within the school. However, despite the radical break in hierarchical structure, ...
Read more

Ryn Forquer Blogpost #4 - AI and Nightshade

Image
     Ben Zhao, a professor at The University of Chicago, has created a program called Nightshade, designed to “poison” AI image generators to stop infringement upon artists’ copyrighted work. Nightshade works by shifting pixels in artwork, confusing the technology on the work’s subject– thus making it possible for an AI generator to transform what is supposed to be an image of a dog into a picture of a cat and so on. The hope behind the creation of this tool is that enough people will use Nightshade that AI generator databases will become unable to produce accurate outputs. Creators of Nightshade include Ben Zhao, Shawn Shan, Wenxin Ding, Josephine Passananti, and Haitao Zheng– at the University of Chicago. The creation of Nightshade comes in response to repeated claims from artists that AI generators, such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, use copyrighted works in the database they draw from. So far, very few laws have addressed this issue– hence the creation ...
Read more

Blog Post #1- The Lonely Palette ep.64

Image
  I listened to an episode of the podcast, The Lonely Palette. I chose the episode about artist Barbara Kruger because I have a strong interest in feminism/activism in art. The episode gave a brief summary of her life and the impacts of her work, specifically her 1989 piece, “Your Body is a Battleground.” Kruger attributed her art style to her background in graphic design. In this piece, she mirrors the face of a woman from a 1950s magazine, half beautiful, half frightening. In bold, highlighted red text the phrase “Your body is a battleground.” Kruger made this work for a pro-choice rally march on Washington, and it blew up as a symbol for protesters across the country. This piece is so simple and yet packs a punch to the viewer. So, what makes this work so impactful? She uses specific and curated language to deliver her message to the viewer. Kruger uses language to her advantage, commenting “I think I developed language skills to deal with the threat. It’s the girl thing to do –...
Read more