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Let it be known that any mistakes in the interpretation of this art are mine and mine alone! :)

The artist Tarsila do Amaral created the oil painting, Abaporu, in 1928. Abaporu means the man who eats people in Tupi, a language spoken by an aboriginal people of Brazil. Abá means man, poro means people, and ‘u means to eat. It was a birthday present to her husband, Oswald de Andrade. Oswald was a writer and the painting inspired him to write the Anthropophagic Manifesto. This manifesto then inspired a movement that was centered around the engulfing of European culture so that Brazilian culture could rise. 

I was drawn to this painting inexplicably. The colors are simple, yet striking. After reading for SDLC 105, this painting left me thinking about meaning. It is so approachable because the colors make sense to just about anyone. The ground and plants are green, the person tan, and the sun yellow and gold. They are distinct and shaded. Then, as you further study the painting, you realize that things are distorted, simplified, and rounded. The first thing I noticed were the person’s feet. The detail with which the big toe nail is shaded, only to have this detail fade with each passing toe. The person’s foot and calf are also enormous. To me, it makes them look more grounded and dominating in the painting. I had similar thoughts about their hand. It also makes this person look like they’re at rest on this hillside. The body begins to taper off dramatically to the subject’s head and other hand. He leans on his knuckles studying his audience. The figure also looks a little lonely and bored, something I believe because of his posture, even though he lacks any expression. Sometimes when I look at a painting, I feel the odd feeling that I can be seen or at least that someone made a painting knowing that it would make you look at yourself too. It feels like a challenge. Why am I viewing this painting? How am I viewing this painting? What is it making me feel? 

I particularly enjoy the natural features in the painting. I love the simplicity of the hill. Nothing has texture in this painting. There is no grass on the ground or spikes on the cactus. They are simple, yet contrast beautifully with the person’s skin and the sky. The sky is also simple, yet gorgeous, not a cloud in sight. I found the sun especially interesting in that it is the childlike depiction of a circle with lines stretching from it in every direction as well a yellow circle around it representing its glow. It makes the scene idyllic and further contributes to the altered reality of this painting. 

Overall, I see how this painting inspired a movement. It is authentic, yet it definitely draws from the inspiration of other artists of the time. As her husband’s movement describes, it took from the influences of the time and made something elevated and inspiring. 

Recently, I was watching a Korean TV series that just started. In the TV series, I saw a lot of historical buildings in South Korea, so I wanted to know more about them. On my previous trip to Seoul, I visited the Gyeongbokgung Palace, and there is another important historical site in Seoul that I failed to see, Jongmyo Shrine. Jongmyo is the oldest and most authentic of the Confucian royal shrines to have been preserved. Dedicated to the forefathers of the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), the shrine has existed in its present form since the 16th century and houses tablets bearing the teachings of members of the former royal family. Ritual ceremonies linking music, song, and dance still take place there, perpetuating a tradition that goes back to the 14th century. These buildings in jongmyo are usually asymmetrical in position, but they are symmetrical as a whole. 

According to the space and importance of the order, the main hall and longing hall eaves, the height of the roof, and the thickness of the columns are not the same. The number and thickness of the columns increased with the number of worshiped gods, resulting in a unique size and shape of the interior space. Although the main hall is the longest wooden building in Korea, the overall style and decoration are relatively simple. There are two special paths in jongmyo, one for the soul and the other for the king. The pavements of the two roads are paved with black brick and stone, which makes them different from ordinary roads. The path of the king was slightly higher than that of the left and right sides. Only the king and his son could walk in the middle, and the officials walked on the left and right sides. This shows the dignity and authority of the temples in South Korea.

The main activity held in jongmyo is sacrifice, so sacrificial music is indispensable. In every jongmyo ritual, there are songs and dances to pray for peace and development of the country and to praise literature and martial arts. In the sacrificial ceremonies of Korean ancestors, "musicians" in red robes made beautiful music with instruments such as stone, metal, wood, leather, and silk. While playing the unique sacrificial music, some exquisitely dressed people offered wine and offerings to their ancestors, while other young dancers, dressed in scarlet, stood in a neat square, slowly bending and swaying in a simple and restrained dance. On the first Sunday of each may, the descendants of the Korean royal family hold a ceremony in Seoul to honor their ancestors and their great achievements. In 2001, jongmyo ritual and jongmyo music was listed on the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCO.

China also has the same function as the jongmyo building, which is the Tai temple. In contrast to the complex and ornate Chinese imperial temples, Seoul's jongmyo temple is characterized by a long facade, simple décor, and few colors said to embody the Confucian spirit of simplicity. In terms of the architectural arrangement, the main feature of jongmyo in Seoul is that it is built according to the natural terrain, so it is not like Chinese architecture to have a unified central axis. From the appearance, there is no unity in the main palaces, but the building successfully achieves the unity of the whole by cleverly utilizing the concepts of order and moderation.

These readings emphasize to me how little we know about the brain. While a lot of the claims in the first reading are based on scientific evidence, I also know that a lot of the studies of the brain are based on what results when parts of it malfunctions or what part is stimulated during certain situations. However, I am not a neuroscientist, so it is possible that this is too wide of a generalization. Reading about how language and meaning is processed and created in the brain, however, still highlights to me how immensely complex the processes in our brain are and how little we are able to physiologically visualize as of now. I thought that little anomalies like the left hemisphere being more dominant when it comes to language in right handed people, but that not being the case in left-handed people were fascinating and also just so confusing. It makes me think about evolution and how our bodies are not always operating in the most efficient fashion. They are using pre-existing processes and structures that have changed over time to better fit the needs of humans. Language processing and comprehension in the brain, even particularly in left-handed people, could have different processes, in a way that manifests in these varying dominances of the hemispheres. Dominance could be the wrong approach entirely. Who knows! Probably not me after reading two chapters. I also thought the exploration of meaning was particularly powerful, specifically that connections between words and phrases are arbitrary, even the meaning of meaning. One question that I began to wonder as I read was does language more affect how we see the world or does how see the world more affect our language?