Reflection 2 — The Silent Witness
Earlier this semester, I visited the “The Shadow We Create” exhibition at the Cameron Art Museum. This exhibition raises questions on social inequality and the consequences of not speaking about it. Among the artworks, the most stunning piece is the Silent Witness created by Mary Bowron. This piece features small scary skulls with no mouth, symbolizing unspoken humiliations to human dignity as well as the fear of voicing out. The skulls together represent the fear of everyone of telling what they have witnessed, and the silence resulted in humankind.
This artwork shocked me not only because of how haunting it is, but how it echoes with the world’s current socio-political situation. The creation of this artwork span over a decade, but human rights are increasingly being trampled on especially in countries such as China, North Korea, and Afghanistan in the past few years. This piece also reminds me of how collective silence further encouraged tyrannies to insult human dignity, and makes me feel heartbroken with the people under these tyrannies fearing the consequences of speaking of what they have witnessed. Human dignity that was once lost under Nazi Germany was found after the war, but it is facing danger again.
A good art piece should not only be appealing. It should connect with the real world and deliver some messages to the viewers. The Silent Witness did exactly the job. In our pursuit of the ability to design thinking, we should always keep human dignity in mind and discover problems and develop solutions that lead our world to a just society.
