(no subject)
so lately i've been doing a lot of thinking in terms of race and representation in the context of costume design and the entertainment industry in general. i think this has been brought on by a variety of things, but most of all i think its really an extension of my grappling with my self identity, both in terms of my mixed heritage and who i want to be as a designer.
this is probably because i'm having a bit of an existensial crisis in my own life. so i'm half chinese, and i recently found out i'm going to china in september, although i speak no chinese and have spent the last five years telling people i'm a blood traitor for having studied japan while almost completely ignoring the country of my own heritage. soon after i found out about my trip (which i am excited about) i found out i got nominated for a scholarship for students of chinese heritage, and i'm finding that i'm now going to have to write an essay about my chineseness and why i deserve the award. perhaps another cause of this or a result, who knows, is that we're designing dangerous liaisons in design class, which is set in the 18th century. and in my research, i was surprised to find what a huge role chinoiserie played in arts and culture at the time. i'm planning on incorporating chinoiserie into my design project because i found this to be one of the most fascinating parts of my research.
i guess it's just that more and more i'm finding how eurocentric the media is, and the more i notice the more it really starts to bother me. oftentimes various cultures are simply reduced to stereotypes, which more often than not are barely based in any sort of truth. really good roles for minority actors, especially asian or latino actors, are really few, and often they are just relegated to being comic relief or token people of color. it seems a lot like if a show or movie features more than a few minority actors as leads it is relegated to being "for a black audience" or "for an asian audience", as if having more than one person of color as a main character means it will be less interesting to anyone who isn't that color.
the more i see how underrepresented respectful, honest portrayals of minorities are in the media, the more i want to work on projects that involve these subjects. so i've been finding myself being really drawn to asian american themes this year, and on the one hand i get self conscious that people are going to pigeon hole me as being "the designer who does asian stuff" and on the other hand i feel like to simply do something like set my dangerous liaisons in a strictly period accurate 18th century france would be going against who i am. so i'm going to forge forth, because what i keep telling myself is that SOMEONE has to care about these things, and as it stands right now i seem to be the only one around who does enough to do something about it.
i think one of the biggest problems i have with issues of representing minorities in costume design is the overgeneralization that seems so commonplace, especially in theater. one small thing that has been really been bothering me lately is that there are two chinese characters in anything goes. first of all, they're going to be played by non-asian women, which i understand is a casting issue and i'm pretty much fine with. what has been annoying me however, is these hats that they are supposed to wear. so they are the cliche chinese hats that you can buy in chinatown, which is fine, i mean i know we're not on unlimited budget here, and actually they could be a lot worse. but they have those ridiculous yarn braids hanging off the back, which i've been trying to get the designers to take out, because they're completely inaccurate. those braids are a completely oversimplified representation of a hairstyle called a queue, which was worn during the qing dynasty as a symbol of loyalty to the government. aside from they they are made from cheap yarn and look horrible and nothing like real hair, there a number of reasons why they are completely inappropriate for this production.
1) anything goes is set in the 1930s, and that hairstyle was out of style by the turn of the century.
2) these characters are supposed to be reformed gamblers and crooks, they would hardly be wearing hairstyles affiliating them with the rule of the government.
3) these chinese men have left china and are in the united states, which again would hardly suggest that they were dedicated subjects of china.
now, granted that they are being led around by a minister who is supposedly reforming their wayward ways, so you could theoretically make an argument that the minister insisted that they wear this archaic style in order to emphasize their chineseness to the americans they were associating with, but seriously. do we really need to go that far when we can just take off the braid? anyway, i'm hoping they'll take the braids out, but who knows.. bleh.
which brings me to one conclusion i've made for myself out of all of this soul searching is this:
in terms of offending your audience, it's one thing to do your research, know what the ideal is, and to make a design choice to do something different or to not be able to afford to reach the ideal, but it's quite another to not do your background research and to make decisions based on stereotypes and oversimplified cliches. just because you can buy something from a costume store and it says "chinese" or "japanese" or whatever on it, doesn't mean it is, and more often than not, it won't be.
especially in terms of chinese and japanese things lately, i guess i've been getting picky about things like this, and i'm constantly second guessing myself to not become "that person". i feel like i spent four years at oxy rolling my eyes at "that person" who was constantly getting offended by things, and now that i'm no longer in the hyper liberal bubble that is oxy, it's like the scale has adjusted and suddenly i'm the one way off here in left field. anyway, just shutting up isn't an option though. someone has to stick up for the little guy.
i went up to stock and was poking around in the chinese and japanese sections and they were just so pathetic. nothing in there much resembling anything accurate. just theatrical stuff riffing on asian motifs and silhouettes in the way that pf changs is somehow getting away with calling themselves "chinese". it's just frustrating, really, because some of these same people get so revved up when they talk about doing really deep period research for projects set in europe or america but when it comes to researching anything set in another culture it's somehow okay to just barely skim the surface and reduce it to cliches. and it's like people think that if "chinese woman's dress" doesn't equal a red polyester cheongsam with a gold print on it that the audience will get confused and won't be able to recognize it for what it is. but by sticking to stereotypes like that we ensure that nobody ever will be able to recognize that chinese clothing ever consisted of anything else. it's like how people feel like you can't explore anything deep in children's media, because the kids "won't get it". i like to think that i have more faith in kids than that. so maybe if they watch a movie set in apartheid south africa they might not grasp some of the finer details of the politics or history, but it would at least expose them to the subject, and maybe they'd see it and want to know more, or would ask their parents about the parts they didn't understand and would learn that way. i dunno. i'm getting incredibly rambly, but i guess i just saw a clip of that "handy manny" show the other day and was really put off by it. so what are we teaching kids by having the only tv show they see with a latino main character is one where he is a construction worker? to associate latinos with manual labor?
ooof. anyway. i've just been getting pretty worked up about some of this lately and needed to vent. but i really hope that i will get some opportunities to design shows that are beyond the scope of the european and caucasion sphere that it seems so many schools focus on. i think it's such crap that i had to write an essay on "how i will use my career to further diversity and racial equality" in my application to ucla and i doubt they even looked at it, based on how little the theater department seems to care about racial equality or social justice.
this is probably because i'm having a bit of an existensial crisis in my own life. so i'm half chinese, and i recently found out i'm going to china in september, although i speak no chinese and have spent the last five years telling people i'm a blood traitor for having studied japan while almost completely ignoring the country of my own heritage. soon after i found out about my trip (which i am excited about) i found out i got nominated for a scholarship for students of chinese heritage, and i'm finding that i'm now going to have to write an essay about my chineseness and why i deserve the award. perhaps another cause of this or a result, who knows, is that we're designing dangerous liaisons in design class, which is set in the 18th century. and in my research, i was surprised to find what a huge role chinoiserie played in arts and culture at the time. i'm planning on incorporating chinoiserie into my design project because i found this to be one of the most fascinating parts of my research.
i guess it's just that more and more i'm finding how eurocentric the media is, and the more i notice the more it really starts to bother me. oftentimes various cultures are simply reduced to stereotypes, which more often than not are barely based in any sort of truth. really good roles for minority actors, especially asian or latino actors, are really few, and often they are just relegated to being comic relief or token people of color. it seems a lot like if a show or movie features more than a few minority actors as leads it is relegated to being "for a black audience" or "for an asian audience", as if having more than one person of color as a main character means it will be less interesting to anyone who isn't that color.
the more i see how underrepresented respectful, honest portrayals of minorities are in the media, the more i want to work on projects that involve these subjects. so i've been finding myself being really drawn to asian american themes this year, and on the one hand i get self conscious that people are going to pigeon hole me as being "the designer who does asian stuff" and on the other hand i feel like to simply do something like set my dangerous liaisons in a strictly period accurate 18th century france would be going against who i am. so i'm going to forge forth, because what i keep telling myself is that SOMEONE has to care about these things, and as it stands right now i seem to be the only one around who does enough to do something about it.
i think one of the biggest problems i have with issues of representing minorities in costume design is the overgeneralization that seems so commonplace, especially in theater. one small thing that has been really been bothering me lately is that there are two chinese characters in anything goes. first of all, they're going to be played by non-asian women, which i understand is a casting issue and i'm pretty much fine with. what has been annoying me however, is these hats that they are supposed to wear. so they are the cliche chinese hats that you can buy in chinatown, which is fine, i mean i know we're not on unlimited budget here, and actually they could be a lot worse. but they have those ridiculous yarn braids hanging off the back, which i've been trying to get the designers to take out, because they're completely inaccurate. those braids are a completely oversimplified representation of a hairstyle called a queue, which was worn during the qing dynasty as a symbol of loyalty to the government. aside from they they are made from cheap yarn and look horrible and nothing like real hair, there a number of reasons why they are completely inappropriate for this production.
1) anything goes is set in the 1930s, and that hairstyle was out of style by the turn of the century.
2) these characters are supposed to be reformed gamblers and crooks, they would hardly be wearing hairstyles affiliating them with the rule of the government.
3) these chinese men have left china and are in the united states, which again would hardly suggest that they were dedicated subjects of china.
now, granted that they are being led around by a minister who is supposedly reforming their wayward ways, so you could theoretically make an argument that the minister insisted that they wear this archaic style in order to emphasize their chineseness to the americans they were associating with, but seriously. do we really need to go that far when we can just take off the braid? anyway, i'm hoping they'll take the braids out, but who knows.. bleh.
which brings me to one conclusion i've made for myself out of all of this soul searching is this:
in terms of offending your audience, it's one thing to do your research, know what the ideal is, and to make a design choice to do something different or to not be able to afford to reach the ideal, but it's quite another to not do your background research and to make decisions based on stereotypes and oversimplified cliches. just because you can buy something from a costume store and it says "chinese" or "japanese" or whatever on it, doesn't mean it is, and more often than not, it won't be.
especially in terms of chinese and japanese things lately, i guess i've been getting picky about things like this, and i'm constantly second guessing myself to not become "that person". i feel like i spent four years at oxy rolling my eyes at "that person" who was constantly getting offended by things, and now that i'm no longer in the hyper liberal bubble that is oxy, it's like the scale has adjusted and suddenly i'm the one way off here in left field. anyway, just shutting up isn't an option though. someone has to stick up for the little guy.
i went up to stock and was poking around in the chinese and japanese sections and they were just so pathetic. nothing in there much resembling anything accurate. just theatrical stuff riffing on asian motifs and silhouettes in the way that pf changs is somehow getting away with calling themselves "chinese". it's just frustrating, really, because some of these same people get so revved up when they talk about doing really deep period research for projects set in europe or america but when it comes to researching anything set in another culture it's somehow okay to just barely skim the surface and reduce it to cliches. and it's like people think that if "chinese woman's dress" doesn't equal a red polyester cheongsam with a gold print on it that the audience will get confused and won't be able to recognize it for what it is. but by sticking to stereotypes like that we ensure that nobody ever will be able to recognize that chinese clothing ever consisted of anything else. it's like how people feel like you can't explore anything deep in children's media, because the kids "won't get it". i like to think that i have more faith in kids than that. so maybe if they watch a movie set in apartheid south africa they might not grasp some of the finer details of the politics or history, but it would at least expose them to the subject, and maybe they'd see it and want to know more, or would ask their parents about the parts they didn't understand and would learn that way. i dunno. i'm getting incredibly rambly, but i guess i just saw a clip of that "handy manny" show the other day and was really put off by it. so what are we teaching kids by having the only tv show they see with a latino main character is one where he is a construction worker? to associate latinos with manual labor?
ooof. anyway. i've just been getting pretty worked up about some of this lately and needed to vent. but i really hope that i will get some opportunities to design shows that are beyond the scope of the european and caucasion sphere that it seems so many schools focus on. i think it's such crap that i had to write an essay on "how i will use my career to further diversity and racial equality" in my application to ucla and i doubt they even looked at it, based on how little the theater department seems to care about racial equality or social justice.