Art Education’s David Pariser looks at how Chinese and Westerners appreciate art differently.

By David King

Art Education’s David Pariser with Chinese artwork of traditional door gods, called “men-shen.” He says: “China is fascinating right now. It is worth studying the art market, and seeing what kind of art the new middle class is gravitating towards.”

It was by happy accident that David Pariser, who teaches in Concordia’s Department of Art Education and is director of Student-teaching Internships for the BFA Specialization Program, first encountered the early childhood graphics of Chinese children. In the early ‘90s, Pariser became thesis advisor for LiQin Tan, MFA 93, who is now professor of art and head of animation at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J. Tan arrived at Concordia in the late ‘80s, just before the Tiananmen Square protests.

Painting of a men-shen by six-year-old children from China’s Gou Dong Province.

Pariser was immediately impressed by Tan’s intelligence and spirit. Tan soon helped familiarize Pariser with Eastern art through 11-year-old Chinese prodigy Wang Yani, who toured the West in 1989. After seeing Yani’s exhibition in San Francisco, Calif., Pariser began to formulate more global questions and comparisons that could be integrated into his research on “the universalities of graphic development and of what’s specific to a culture,” Pariser says. “In the early ‘90s, Yani’s appearance catalyzed many of my interests: developmental psychology, the study of artistically gifted children and cross-cultural aesthetics.”

Pariser and Tan developed a series of small studies around Yani’s work, and discovered that Chinese Montreal artists were not as impressed by her artistry as their Western counterparts. Pariser continued his cross-cultural explorations of aesthetics and graphic representation in the mid-’90s. Alongside colleagues Axel van den Berg of McGill and Anna Kindler of the University of British Columbia, he investigated an aesthetic theory— advanced by educational psychologist Howard Gardner— called the “U-Curve,” which claims that young children’s artwork is highly aesthetic but loses these qualities as the child matures. Only works by individuals destined to be artists regain their aesthetic qualities.

Painting a of men-shen by six-year-old children from China’s Gou Dong Province.

In 1997, Pariser and his colleagues launched a research program that tested Gardner’s theory by comparing Chinese and North American judges’ assessments of the same set of drawings by artists and non-artists of all ages from Montreal’s Chinese community. “We had Eastern and Western art-trained judges who completely failed to agree with one another. Western-trained judges found that a U-Curve did exist and the Chinese-trained judges didn’t,” Pariser recalls.

In 2000, Pariser and his colleagues funded a study with a larger sample of 3,000 drawings and 190 judges from Canada, Brazil and Taiwan. Their results revealed that the propensity to equate children’s art with the work of mature artists was not specific to Western artists, and the majority of judges found no parallels between the works of children and adults. “We’re processing a lot of material, publishing our findings and mining the data that we have accumulated,” he says..

If you have any comments about this article, contact Howard Bokser, (514) 848-2424 ext. 3826, Howard.Bokser@concordia.ca