Author: elahehia

Dip the brush in the white, olive, brown, black of your foundation,
And paint your face and prepare for war
Paint it well to frighten your opponents,
Your mascara is your shield,
Your blush is why you fight,
Your eyeliner is what you fight with,
Your red lipstick, your war paint
The colors on your face are the colors you wear to battle
Wear them proudly.

And whatever you do, do not spear those who do not paint their faces remember that those who do not paint their faces are also fighting the battle with you.

These are stunning portraits of some of the world’s most remote tribes before they pass away.

Amazing photography.

I am Telugu, an Indian sub-lingustic/ethnic group. It’s funny, I remember a few years ago, going to a Telugu cultural event and the MC telling the audience that according to anthropological and scientific studies, Telugu was going to die out in about a hundred or so years and I remember being stunned at that fact.

Because I’ve lived in so many places, I feel uncomfortable labeling myself one specific term or narrowing my identity down to one culture but Telugu was the exception. I’ve never quite had a home but Telugu was as close as it got and the idea of the culture and language I grew up with having a concrete expiration date haunts me, the way it’s troubling to accept your aging parents will soon die, pass away, cease to exist, and those you love will no longer have the ability to get to know them the way you did.

Though these tribes are unique and entirely different than the predicament Telugu people are in, I can’t help but feel solidarity. The sorrow of our situation, however, is bittersweet because it is reassuring and humbling to realize that cultures will come and go but civilization will march on.

We are all but a mote of dust, suspended on a sunbeam.

Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and photographer, is one of the most outspoken critics of the Communist government. He is internationally known for his witty and almost taunting art which challenge not only the methods and ideologies of the Chinese government but also our ideologies. Principles we hold so dear, he brushes aside as useless or foolish.

One of my favorite pieces of his is the series of pictures (“tripartite photograph” for all the photography buffs out there) he took of himself breaking a Han dynasty urn (approximately 2000 years old) in 1995. This piece is (aptly) named “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”.

This was the first Ai Weiwei piece I saw, featured in an article when he was first arrested, back when I didn’t even know who he was. When I first saw it, I winced. Who did this man think he was, dropping such a precious urn, which holds so much history and heritage, as if it was nothing? But, as I later learned, that’s the point. He was bashing our obsession with idols and images, our idea that by worshipping an image or an object, we worship what it stands for – culture and civilization. This image has become, ironically, an icon of iconoclasm.

But perhaps, it goes deeper than that. Maybe he was bashing the Chinese government, demonstrating how carelessly it destroyed temples and historical artifacts to more effectively deliver its narrative of China’s past and future. Or maybe he was making a statement, showing how old culture must be destroyed in order to make way for the new. Here’s part of the caption of this picture on its online auction page:

While the triptych gained notoriety as an iconoclastic gesture, it encapsulates several broader constants in Ai’s work: the socio-political commentary on the random nature of vectors of power; questions of authenticity and value (vis-à-vis the artist’s comment that the value of “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” has today exceeded that of the once-prized urn itself), and the cycle of creative destruction necessary for any culture’s survival and evolution.

Damn.

So, I support Ai Weiwei not only because he epitomizes free speech at its best and not only because he is a much needed activist in China but because he is a provocateur – something very few people are bold enough to be and something many more people should be.

Wo ai ni, Ai Weiwei.

If you spend a godless amount of time on YouTube, you know the concept of tags. You make a video about something and tag other users at the end and those users make a similar video and tag others and so on. The most recent tag is the “Draw Your Life” tag where YouTubers are doing exactly that, drawing their life stories and making videos of it. Here’s the legendary Jenna Marbles with her video:

This is such a cool tag to me. It’s people who don’t generally use stereotypical art as their preferred medium of expression using stereotypical art as a medium of expression.

Explore. And possibly make your own?

Oh my god this link I found is cray cray.