About:Weird Studies

“Strange Studies” is the first stage of our study into this major of contemporary art theory, which is introduced in the course introduction on the school website：“Weird Studies” is a scholarly field that doesn’t and can’t exist. The Weird is that which resists any settled explanation or frame of reference. It is the bulging file labelled “other/misc.” in our mental filing cabinet, full of supernatural entities, magical synchronicities, and occult rites. But it also appears when a work of art breaks in on our habits of perception and ordinary things become uncanny. This was a new, new, crazy academic concept for me. As a concept with a strong rebellious spirit, “strange research” is not simply looking for a strange looking artwork, nor simply completing a strange novel, but trying to discover new ways of thinking and academic concepts that we have not yet mastered. These things in the case of a complete stranger for us may be a “strange”, but when we are able to learn and understand the concept of art, such a “strange” will become our methodology, and to attempt to use these strange concept design to create a belong to my own artistic theory.

I chose“ Neo-Pagan; Bitch-Witch! ”in Miro. As the starting point of my creation, I think it may bring me some inspiration for new creation and research. I try to China’s hunan province minority – yao’s traditional ritual dance and dance gesture on behalf of the semiotic meaning of deconstruction, to worship the decomposition of body language in the process, and make it different from other countries, at different times, different cultural background of artists, trying to explore contained in the body language of religious consciousness. In this creation and association of “strange art”, I compared six different forms of art works, including literature, photography, performance art, Japanese butoh, German dance theater and an experiment of traditional sacrifice and modern dance art by Chinese artists.In our last class on “strange”, we began to experiment with conspiratorial storytelling, comparing two seemingly unrelated events to create a bizarre story about the possible connection between two subjects. This way of thinking and creative method is a completely new concept for me, which may be helpful for my further academic exploration and research.

Through the initial contact with “Strange art” in the first two weeks and some simple creative attempts, I try to combine the academic theoretical knowledge and educational model of contemporary art with the academic classroom that I want to further study, and take this as my main research topic in the postgraduate stage. As I majored in dance during my undergraduate study, and I hope to continue to engage in the research and creation of dance-related art industry in the future, I set the core of my postgraduate study as the study of “body language”, and based on this, I try to derive three research directions that are still under exploration. They are as follows: The first is “Symbolic Study of gesture Language in Traditional Chinese Dance”; the second is “Ritual Deconstruction of Yao sacrificial Dance in Hunan, China”; the third is “Dance Body language and gender Cognition Education”.

The “gesture language” mentioned in the hypothesis of the first subject is an important branch of semiotics. In traditional Chinese dances and even dances in other parts of the world, different gesture languages represent different meanings and emotional expressions. In the context of traditional Chinese dance, different gestures can even represent different ethnic beliefs and religious meanings. When learning dance, people tend to pay more attention to the arrangement of costumes, music and movements, while the representative gestures are often ignored. So much so that the expression of gesture language by default is an expression that can be ignored and taken for granted. In my opinion, the study of gesture language can be more in-depth and comprehensive exploration.

The choice of the second project comes from one of the important projects in my undergraduate period — “the Long Inspiration of Yao Nationality”. Yao as one of China’s 56 ethnic minorities, has a very unique is different from other nation’s historical development, in the past several thousand years, yao people has been constantly moving around, and hunan and guangxi areas, the mountains, the geographical position of blocking, makes the yao people’s basic not under the influence of Chinese mainstream culture, developed a set of complete system of religious culture. Besides, Yao sacrificial ceremonies mainly revolve around the king “Panhu” in the historical legend of Yao nationality. As the only national totem with inverted image in Chinese history, “Panhu” plays a very important role in the research of religion and anthropology.

Finally the choice of a topic from my undergraduate and medical students during an experiment, we tried to use the interdisciplinary research methods to explore “dance therapy” and the feasibility of children autistic disorder treatments between, but because we lack the creation of long-term experiment conditions, in the short term is open to dancing limbs of children with autism, We found that dance psychology can have a good effect on the gender cognition of young children. Therefore, I try to continue to explore this issue in the postgraduate stage, hoping to create dance textbooks that can simultaneously promote artistic enlightenment and children’s gender education.

For me, the course of contemporary art theory has been leading me to explore and discover new perspectives of thinking. Whether it is “strange research” or other unit learning, it can bring me new cognition from different aspects such as thinking mode, teaching method and creation concept.