Art therapy
Children paint to support fight against pandemic
As with so many things in life, children can get to the heart of the matter often quicker than adults. So, they call him “Logger Vick” due to this amiable man’s bald-headed appearance resembling the leading character in popular Chinese animation Boonie Bears.
Though now based in Beijing with his family, William Yip, a 43-year-old Hong Kong drama director and educator, took more than 200 flights across China in 2019 alone to usher drama into classes, in places ranging from firsttier metropolises to small towns in the west.
Yip describes his busy itinerary as “bittersweet”. It’s exhausting but worth it. His passion and humor shine through. Drama is like “vitamin C” to Yip: You can survive without it for some time, but it is ultimately essential to sustain health.
This energetic man is meeting a challenge familiar to everyone. Periods of self-quarantine at home due to the outbreak of COVID-19 can plunge people into depression.
“Many children said they are fed up being isolated at home in spite of online courses,” Yip recalls. “I want to do something to help them.”
In 2018, Yip took his students to Denmark, home of the great fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen. They presented the drama The
Nightingale, adapted from the only China-themed story under Andersen’s pen, to local audiences at an arts festival.
He was there again in early February, when the novel coronavirus had not yet become so disruptive in Europe. He discussed with Danish artists how to cheer people up during the crisis and Andersen’s name kept cropping up.
“Talking about Andersen, people thought initially that he was just for children as I did years ago,” Yip tells China Daily in a telephone interview. “But his stories include a philosophy for life. Adults can also feel connected when they read them.”
Cooperating with the ChineseDanish Cultural Alliance and the Hans Christian Andersen Foundation in Denmark, Yip soon drafted the “H.C. Andersen award initiative” after returning to Beijing.
In the project, which kicked off in late February, Yip uses The Bottle
Neck, a lesser-known fairy tale written by Andersen in 1857, as the theme, and asks people to upload their own literary or artistic works inspired by that story. Participants can freely choose their favored genre or format.
Lisa Johansen, co-founder of the Chinese-Danish Cultural Alliance, tells China Daily via email that “our common interest is to share the originality of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and to open up the creativity and imagination of children — and adults, too”.
The Bottle Neck follows the story of a wine bottle. It is a tale told by the bottleneck about how it remembers being crafted and filled with quality wine, before being opened during an engagement celebration. It relates how a sailor took the bottle with him on a sea journey and how the ship was wrecked in a storm. The bottle traveled around the world and returned home, with only the bottle’s neck intact. An old lady picks it up and she doesn’t realize that she drank wine from this bottle at her engagement party.
“The old bottle didn’t know her either, partly — in fact, chiefly — because it thought only of itself.” The ending of the story, for example, seems to be pertinent for today’s world.
Pause for a cause
As father of a 1-year-old baby, Yip can relate to this story.
“The pandemic has disrupted many people’s lives,” he says. “But we may be able to settle down and spend more time with our families.
The Bottle Neck is a good story for us to understand the meaning of life and it leads us to think: When life is no longer usual, what should we do?”
Yip deliberately avoids Andersen’s more famous stories like The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Ugly
Duckling, or The Little Match Girl.
He explains that sometimes it is difficult to set the imagination free when the story is too familiar.
Deadline for uploading submissions will be April 2, fittingly, Andersen’s birthday. More than 600 pieces have been handed to Yip so far.
The works presented cover various genres — paintings, video clips with dancing, singing and even short dramas, poems and short stories.
Andersen was not only a writer, but also cultivated in drama, drawings, singing and many other genres of art, Johansen says.
“Alongside his work as a writer, he is probably best known for his paper-cuts,” Johansen says.
She was pleasantly surprised to see how this project has developed “in such a short time’’.
“It is so amazing to see the many creative works the Chinese children have sent in,” she adds. “It shows that the stories and the values of the fairy tales are just as relevant today as they were 200 years ago.”
Many works handed in to the project have combined the bottle story with that of COVID-19, calling for a strong spirit to conquer the pandemic and more caring hearts during the crisis. In children’s paintings the team received, some chose to contain the virus in the bottle, some made it into a superhero or a spaceship to fight against the alienlike and villainous virus, and others imagined the bottle as a protective shield for medical workers. Parodies and sequences of The
Bottle Neck keep popping up as well. In a story titled The Towel, written by 11-year-old candidate Liu Zihan, a towel at first envies a mask, which is a newcomer to the family and a rival who always touches the master’s face. But “one day, the mask never comes back and no one knows where it has gone”.
“Like the four seasons, our life has gains and losses,” Qiao Zhongliang, a 32-year-old participant, who sent in a video clip, writes in an attached short paragraph. “When life is experiencing loss, wait for a moment. Everything will revive in the end.”
Yip soon found the themes of the work “too abundant to be closely connected with The Bottle Neck”.
He recounts that a child wrote about a floating cloud that brings rain to thirsty lands. “That echoes our feelings today,” Yip says. “Sometimes we’re incapable of really helping others (in the outbreak of COVID-19), but we still want to spread hope in a gentle way — like a cloud.”
Autistic children are encouraged to join in. Their paintings may not be themed on bottles, but they let their imagination drift through amazing colors and patterns. “Any work is welcome as long as it can be loosely linked with the drifting bottle,” Yip says.
More than rewarding
At the end of the project, three winners will be given round-trip tickets from China to Denmark to visit the writer’s hometown, but Yip does not see the project as a competition. “It’s more like encouragement for creativity,” Yip says. “The works by the winners may not be that exquisitely-made, but they will offer a fresh angle.”
All of the submissions may have the chance to be exhibited in the future when the outbreak ends, Yip says, adding that “it will be meaningful for us to look back upon our life in the days of the crisis”.
They are already being “exhibited” in digital form on Yip’s official public WeChat account.
“It’s hard to compare different art genres, but people can view all the works on this open platform and have their own opinions,” he says, adding that a judging group comprising 15 leaders from the education sector and different fine art genres were invited to choose the winners.
Qian Zhilong, a veteran independent researcher on education, is one of them. He places priority on “reflection of true emotions”. Qian believes that the Andersen award project will have a lasting legacy for Chinese children.
“Andersen was mediocre at school, but his achievements finally attracted worldwide attention due to the power of dreams,” Qian says. “In today’s schools, children are still faced with a ubiquitous judging system that is based on test papers, which often nips in the bud children’s power to dream.”
Qian says he hopes that by participating in this program, people will be more inspired after they learn more about Andersen’s own story.
The judge also says that the pandemic has given society a chance to re-evaluate the current education system, when the pause button of this “assembly line” is finally pushed after becoming overheated.
“Our pedagogies and goals of education will be reformed, replaced or will evolve into new ones,” he says. “The epidemic gives us time to think what we’ve done right and what was done wrong. It may enable an earlier evolution.”
And the changing situation of COVID-19 attaches a greater global significance to the project.
“When the idea was started in February, the purpose was to encourage Chinese children and families during a difficult time,” says Johansen from the ChineseDanish Cultural Alliance. “Now just one month later we are in the same situation in Denmark and Europe.
“The world is connected,” she says. “We need each other … in order to strengthen solidarity and community. In situations like this, art offers hope and deepens understanding. It brings us closer together, both as families and countries. It’s an eye-opener of what is important in life.”
As Andersen once said: “Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”
Yip likes saying that drama is not restricted to stage, when he brings it to schools.
“Fine art is not only concerned about the final results,” he says. “Just like in this art project, we self-examine when we are playing. Play is empowerment.”
The world is connected. We need each other … in order to strengthen solidarity and community. In situations like this, art offers hope and deepens understanding. It brings us closer together, both as families and countries. It’s an eye-opener of what is important in life.”
Lisa Johansen, co-founder of the Chinese-Danish Cultural Alliance