Juanwara's F200X Art Blog

 I've traveled to Thailand a few times now. At the start of my 2025 spring semester, I was in Bangkok. My mother is from Thailand so I often go to visit family. I've been able to reflect a lot on the values I've developed in America. In American culture, there's a very 'Go for it!' attitude. Many of our TV dramas focus on hero based stories: Chicago Fire , C.S.I. , Hawaii five-O , etc. Many paintings and statues being made today represent some sort of heroic figure. Thanks to a lot of observation of American values, I was able to notice a lot of the opulence that surrounds Thai culture. There is a lot of focus on creating an image of vibrancy and beauty. My mom is from Nakorn Phanom, Thailand in the northeast bordering with Laos. During the drive up, even the smallest of villages will often have a large, intricate statue of Buddha or a colorful, beautiful temple. Buddhism plays an important role in Thai culture but a basic element of the Buddhist religion is dis...

Conceptual art is not for everyone. Many people will go to a conceptual art exhibit and simply say, "Well I could've done that, I don't know what the big deal is." People who are fans of the art form will usually respond with, "Well you didn't so..." But to me, the response should be a bit deeper than that. While I don't believe that everyone HAS to like conceptual art, I think it's important to understand where the art is coming from and what it's trying to say. Just because something is not a beautiful, detailed, conventionally easy to understand painting doesn't mean that it can't tell a story.  The Dada movement, though short-lived, was a sort of catalyst for conceptual art. Most can directly attribute a huge shift in the art world to Duchamp's 1917 Fountain . Before that, no one had really taken a ready-made object and tried to make it mean something else. The piece stood out to question what exactly makes something art?    U...

 The Early Modern Era gave way to a number of different art styles. The most prominent probably being forms of abstract art. Abstract art began to develop in response to the first world war. World War I caused terror and trauma that people had never experienced before due to the existence of new technology. There was the use of tanks and bombs but also chemical weapons such as mustard gas that were able to kill people in a much larger capacity than previous times. Of course this had tremendous affects on how artists viewed the world and it opened a whole new need for artists to express themselves. Expressions of the trauma and pain of people needed to be conveyed in ways that people should feel, not just see.  Fauvism is an art style that focused on explosive color and often aggressive brushstrokes. Henri Matisse was a French painter who is most associated with this style. While his style is most known to be colorful and focused on nudes, the war and the influence of Pablo Pic...