Drawing: Who’s Telling the Story?
Instructed by Tae Hwang at Johns Hopkins University
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A picture is worth a thousand words ––but when spoken by who, and to whom? If history is ‘written by the victors’, as is commonly espoused, then are these victors likewise responsible for the historical images which have defined our understanding of the past?
In ‘Drawing: Who’s Telling the Story?’, Johns Hopkins University adjunct instructor Tae Hwang examines the historical usage of propaganda, bias in contemporary media, and data (mis)representation across a variety of visual mediums.
Drawing: Who’s Telling the Story?
School: Johns Hopkins University
Course: Drawing: Who’s Telling the Story?
Instructor: Tae Hwang
Course Description:
What makes an image truthful? Students will create drawings utilizing both traditional and unconventional processes through the lens of historical and political illustrations, propaganda graphics and misinformation, and current events. The course is anchored in, but not limited to, the art practices of Kara Walker’s slavery narrative, George Grosz’s political caricatures of First War Germany, historical war posters, Hugo Crosthwaite’s depiction of the US/MX border to Coronavirus “beauty shot.”
Projects may include revising a historical artwork, manipulating propaganda graphics of the past and the present, redrawing a visual data, and designing a personal narrative drawing project. Field trips, technical demos, discussions, and lectures will provide context and support for students to become image-makers of their own narrative and history.
Ask the Instructor: Tae Hwang
Can you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and the class you designed at Johns Hopkins?
I’m an artist, and my background is in painting. I’m also an adjunct instructor within the Center for Visual Arts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Within my class, ‘Drawing: Who’s Telling the Story’, I wanted to look at how we consume and process the images that have been fed to us historically and contemporarily, particularly since the beginning of the pandemic. Between COVID and the Trump Administration, there have obviously been a lot of things happening in the news. I spent last term sitting in front of my TV, watching the news, wondering: is this the real news? Or is this the news?
I was having a hard time actually decoding what I was meant to get out of the images and texts that the media were referencing, which made me start thinking about the history of propaganda imagery. I began researching interwar-period propaganda, specifically around Europe and North America, and also looked into contemporary artists to see how they interacted with political happenings through their work.
There have been so many striking images in the media this past year — pictures of protesters being gassed by the police, artwork created to honor George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, graphs detailing the extent of COVID’s mortality rate — that it can be overwhelming, at times, to even follow the news. And the way that these images are used, and the way that the audience responds to them, is really dependent on the tone and agenda of the media organization.
Everybody’s news is biased to a certain degree. You can’t just take in a piece of news, or look at images, without thinking: well, where’s this perspective coming from?
Right now, we’re looking at COVID data images, as in charts. These charts have been propagating since COVID — I’m sure there are thousands of charts and data coming out every day — but many of them are designed confusingly, or are misleading. So students are examining the COVID data from poorly-designed charts, then taking them apart to redesign the graphics so that the data is more accessibly displayed. We’ve also been looking at Russian Constructivist posters, W.E.B Dubois charts from the Paris Exposition in 1900, Marie and Otto Neurath’s isotypes … a variety of images.
John Hopkins is such a research–oriented school, it’s not too surprising that a JHU art class would be so data-driven. How long have you taught at Johns Hopkins?
I’ve been here for two-and-a-half, going on three years now.
Is this the first course you’ve designed since joining JHU?
It’s actually the second — the first course, ‘Exploring Lines’, was a collaboration with the Director of the Center for Visual Arts, Margaret Murphy. She came up with the concept for the class and then I developed it.
That class was a studio survey of how different artists engage with lines in their work, ranging from Yoko One’s portfolio to Mark Lombardi’s neo-conceptual data-line art to Van Gogh’s sketches. In designing the class, I wanted to introduce the students to many different practices and perspectives of lines.
How long does it take you to design a course in full?
You know, I was thinking about and prepping for ‘Drawing: Who’s Telling the Story’ for well over a year. At first that meant researching different understandings of how a public opinion is formed and what has historically been considered propaganda from different cultural perspectives. Just teaching myself that diverse information, basically, so that I grasp a sense of it when I bring these concepts to the students.
It’s really important to me that I provide students with materials that are diverse, both in thought and subject matter. The ability to place diverse information within context is critical, not just to art, but to all fields of study. There’s so much out there, and it’s all kind of connected — right?
Right. Speaking of interconnectivity, it sounds like the course is very interdisciplinary.
Absolutely. There’s no art major at JHU, just a minor, so the students in my classes come from all different departments — which brings different perspectives into the classroom. And artists look at everything through a lens; everything that I see informs my art, whether that’s, you know, a cartoon image or a coupon or something in a reading.le
It was also a challenge to adjust this course — which is usually a studio class — to an online setting.
How did you adapt the course to an online format?
When I taught last year — not this class, another class — everything was based on being in person, so I had to quickly adapt to teaching online. This term I knew that we were going to be online, and this is the first time that I’ve taught this class. I wanted to create a studio scenario that was completely different from a typical class –– one focused more on critical thinking in terms of ‘how do we make art’, rather than the actual process of creating art. So I came at the course design from that angle, asking students to think about the work that goes into creating a work of art and examining how images are really sets of information.
I want the students to have their own sets of tools and their own goals. I can tell them what to do, I can show them my tools, but ultimately, their lens — their relationship to art — is their own.
Do you have your students physically make an art piece within the class?
Oh yeah — there are four major projects. I mentioned what they’re currently working on, which is re-representing the data in a graph related to COVID-19. They can either draw the graph by hand or digitally. Then there’s a collage project, where we’re taking old propaganda images and collaging them to tell more modern stories. We’re also doing a comic strip based on the stereotypes we hold. The final project is to create a self-portrait that isn’t a self-portrait, but more of a visual representation of the self.
Were these assignments similar to those that you’d assigned in previous classes?
No, all of these assignments are brand-new, never-been-tested. I developed all of the materials for ‘Drawing’ myself, which probably also took close to a year. I wanted to bring the focus of this class onto contemporary practices, as they are informed by ideas outside of the realm of art, whereas my course ‘Lines’ was really focused on practical application.
At the end of the term, what would you like your students to leave ‘Drawing: Who’s Telling the Story’ having learned?
The class is meant to have the students examine their own logic systems — how they think about the world and their relationships within it. That’s the underlying theme embedded in all of the projects I developed. So, I’d want students to leave the class having recognized that their systems of logic are unique to themselves, as are all individuals’. That understanding of systems, politics, and art can be applied within any discipline.•
NEXT: Music and the Environment in Northeast Asia
Instructed by Kip Hutchins at Oberlin College and Conservatory
