Dream, Imagine, and Experience the Arts

It was at Hangaram Design Museum on last August 25 when the lobby was full of children’s exciting voices. They were children who gathered to participate in ‘The Backpack of Arts’ which is a support project of arts and culture education for children in welfare facilities in 2011. Today’s interesting program included an exciting activity, which was directly making a real animation after seeing the special exhibition of Walt Disney’s animation.

The project started in July, 2011 and was different from the existing ordinary arts education. While the current education is focused on delivering knowledge in the form of lectures, this project provides children with various artistic experiences and opportunities for participation so that they can feel the arts in person. After letting them visit an exhibition or watch a performance, the senior arts educators of related area gave lectures in connection with their preliminary cultural experiences.

‘The Backpack of Arts’ is a nickname of the first pilot program of their planned project. The purpose was to give children in welfare facilities or organizations, who have not had chance to experience an exhibition or a performance, an opportunity to experience it in person. To accomplish this goal, a lot of veteran arts educators in fine arts section, who have more than 4 year experience, were present in full force.

>All sense satisfactory education by feeling, watching, and making

On the spot, an animation making experience for the children was followed by watching the exhibition. The children’s eyes twinkled when they watched the sketches of familiar cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and so on.

The children were creating all sorts of imagination after looking at a picture. The arts educators accompanied them to facilitate their imagination at the exhibition. It was because it was one of the important aims of ‘The Backpack of Arts’ to build up the children’s imagination and widen their experience of appreciating work of arts via the exhibition. In addition, there was a lecture that explained them about the techniques of arts while watching various animations. The class was a preliminary lecture prior to the animation making class.

The children were able to enjoy the exhibitions thanks to the arts educators. While they were getting out of the hall, they did not stop talking about the animation. Now it was time for them to create their own animations and stories! The animation that they were supposed to make was ‘Phenakistiscope’ or also called ‘kaleidoscope’. The phenakistiscope uses a spinning disc attached vertically on a handle so that the user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc’s reflection in a mirror. The process and the product are both interesting to children. As the children’s interest in the animation was enhanced due to the exhibition, all of them concentrated on the instruction of the educators. The interesting teaching method of the experienced educators also drew attention of the children.

My own arts and the process of making a definition of it

The topic of today’s class was “(In my opinion) the animation is OOO.” The children were trying to make a definition on their own animations. “The animation is something fun.”, “The animation is pit-a-pat.”, “The animation is a dream.” and so forth. The young artists of ‘The Backpack of Arts’ were making decent definitions on it. The fruit of arts and culture education was growing ripe while watching, experiencing, feeling, and sharing.

Written by Park Sarah, Photographs from KACES