Blog 03

The third blog is about remix culture and I use the famous artist Jean Michel Basquiat as an example to show how his work affected other cultures.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat is an American artist who connected Neo-expressionism’s intense aesthetic with the vibrant graffiti style. He is good at explaining a phenomenon or an idea in the form of both pictures and texts. Many symbols are often included in his paintings because he has been influenced by anatomy, classic paintings, music, and surroundings.

Basquiat, who has no traditional art education, once explained: “I get the truth from books, graphic text on sprayers, blues music, alcohol, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.” His artistic ideas are mainly derived from the thinking about racism, social injustice, and other issues he experienced in the life of the bottom of the society. At the same time, his obsession with street culture and jazz has also become his source of material and inspiration. His works seem to be arbitrary, but in fact, all kinds of allusions and ingenuity are revealed in the paintings. For example, elements such as skulls, crosses and hallucinogens, distorted expressions, and huge teeth are often present in his works. He used contemporary well-known blacks such as boxing champions and black athletes as the subjects of his paintings, and painted crowns on their heads, a kind of heroism leaped on paper. The crown here is no longer a simple symbol but contains the artist’s love and pride for his race.

Gorvy commented that Basquiat has the unique ability to ingeniously blend street art elements with traditional art history. “He put all his knowledge of art history into his paintings. You can see the emergence of early master painters and abstract expressionists, such as William de Kooning. The speed of his information reception is so fast and the way he absorbed art history is similar to the way he absorbed street art.” He said.

To some extent, contemporary art is a kind of conceptual art. Paintings, sculptures, installations, and other creative works in various forms are a medium of communication. What is important is the concept and thoughts that the artist wants to convey through the work. So it is inevitable to be affected by other cultures and environments because no one lives in a vacuum. I think this kind of artistic creation which can draw nutrients from previous studies and history can achieve an unexpected effect. The most important thing is whether incorporate something new or own thoughts in the process of creating.