The American Way

My amount of work is exponentially increasing at the rate of people wearing shorts on campus (yes, we hit the 50's this week). I'm not going to lie, I've been nodding my head a lot during lectures due to lack of sleep but I'm enjoying the stress. It's good stress! I'm stressed physically but not mentally. I can confidently say this because our guest speaker for symposium, Sam Viviano, who by the way is the Art Director for MAD Magazine, told us about how he has friends who are 88 years old and still illustrating their butts off. Reminded me once again that I am not working to live, but living to work.

I get really excited whenever I find similar themes or common threads in my different classes. Currently, I am working on an illustration piece for A-Line (Asian-American magazine on campus) about how Bollywood is becoming image conscious. Indian women in Mumbai are losing significant weight to look more westernized. They have shows such as "India's Next Top Model," which try to model after America's image of women and their culture. To me, it makes no sense because India is big on modesty and highly values tradition. The idea of diversity is not to force everyone to be the same but to appreciate the differences between people and cultures. The beauty of Indian figures is that they tend to be more voluptuous and have all the right curves. It saddens me that women harm themselves in order to look like someone or something else. When I think about Bollywood, I picture big and graceful contours, accessorized with gems and sheers of vivid colors. To contradict this idea, I'll probably illustrate a group of Bollywood dancers with sharp, jagged bodies that can barely hold up their saris.

It's interesting because in my psychology class, we had to read an article called, "The Americanization of Mental Illness." The first two pages talks about a Chinese doctor who thought that anorexia was just an American illness but he realized how many Chinese women were starting to drastically lose weight and become more obsessed with images from the media. Two questions came in mind: Is China adapting to western illnesses? and, Were Chinese women getting diagnosed according to the AMERICAN standards?

This article and the article from A-Line interested me a lot. Not that both articles are totally related, but it really made me think about how much America influences other nations and cultures-- not just through images but through the way they perceive.
shrugs.


-g