Ziqing Wang

The theme of my conference is Art & Life. What is art? Obviously, it is its literal meaning. What is Life? Life here infers to two words: "living" and "creature". We believe that every art creature is not only an object, it includes feeling, emotions, and idea. The artist who create it with emotions and idea, and make it alive. Also, art is in our life, so we want to talk about how art influence our life. In this conference, we want to talk about art in three culture level: High culture, popular culture, and sub culture. That is because art is the way that how culture show itself and culture is spread by art creatures. Firstly, let’s talk about high culture. We, here, define “high culture” as the culture that has handed down to generations. For example, like jazz, and Chinese traditional culture. To be more specific, such as Chinese traditional culture. In fact, there are many art achievements in Chinese history were close connected with people’s life. We can say that these arts were derive from life and even developed by the needs of life. Such as the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng. People found the biggest chime so far in this relic. The Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng shows people the achievement of Chinese music culture and the art level of Chinese manufacturing process at that time. We can discuss about the culture behind the relic, and study the life of people at that time. In these part, we can find the speakers from the University in Zhengzhou, such as Zhengzhou University. The professor who has profound knowledge about Chinese traditional art and culture are perfect to be our speakers. Second，it’s about popular culture. “Popular Culture” here refers to cultural products such as music, art, literature, fashion, dance, film, television, and radio that are consumed by the majority of a society’s population. The most recent popular culture show in Zhengzhou is The Paradise Lost, which is an installation art show. We now have already invited the curator of The Paradise Lost to talk about his ideas of the installation art show.(He agreed to be our speaker) We want to feature this idea because installations art conclude three factors: places, materials, emotions. The installation artist uses materials from our daily life, artistically replace them in the place, and fills them with emotions, which connects our theme with perfect fit. Another part of the popular culture we want to discuss about is about film. People use camera and lens to record their life and make art works nowadays. We know many Vlogs. They are the group of people who record the beauty in their life and spread them, and some of them have already had huge numbers of fans on social media like Youtube or Bilili. We want to invite them to talk about the reason of why they start to make Vlogs, and what is their passion. Last but not least, The Sub Culture. “Sub culture” is a relative concept to “Popular Culture” and it is divided by ages. For example, the sub culture of the youth includes hiphop, skateboard, and tattoo, etc. The old people’s sub culture in China includes square dancing. If we want to talk about arts in sub culture, there are a number of topics to discuss. Now, we are going to choose one of the topics to help you understand our logics. For example, the skateboard. When we talk about skateboard, we can’t ignore the relationship of popular culture and sub culture. To be more specific, such as the relationship of Vans and skateboard culture. Vans represents fashion as a popular culture. Vans gives a voice to skateboarders, and let the skateboard culture go deep in its brand culture. Skateboarders support Vans, so Vans gets more money flowing. Vans also invites skateboarders to take part in the design of the shoes, and they invent the waffle sole. Nowadays, most majority of youth know Vans or have a pair of Vans shoes. However, only a small part of them play skateboard. As we can see, this case is a typical event that sub culture come into the mainstream life. We want to invite Vans to talk about their attitude about skateboard culture, and how skateboard influences the life of the skateboarders. Above all, We want to discuss Art & Life through these three culture level.