Cultural Anthropology: Intercultural Communication Through Art

Intercultural Communication Through Art

written by Ryan Jang, in June 1, 2009.

Abstract

People have more opportunities to communicate with people from other cultures around the world than ever before. Intercultural communication (ICC) is important in our society which is like a cultural melting pot, such as the U.S. Art has played an important role in our history and culture since people often represent their lifestyles, important historical stories, and unique customs in art. The ArtXchange gallery is an organization which encourages people to interact with different cultures in Seattle. In this paper, through analyzing the ArtXchange gallery and interviewing the director of it, we present how the ArtXchange gallery contributes to ICC and what effects art can have on ICC. This paper shows how exchanging and understanding cultural differences through art is a great tool to help people to have good ICC skills.

1. Introduction
The more the world is globalized, the more people have chances to interact with other people from different cultures and countries. What is culture and how are cultures different? What happens between different cultures? How can we deal with cultural differences? The answers to these questions are not simple, but important in our society which is like a cultural melting pot. Especially, there are diverse ethnic groups originally from different cultures in the U.S., such as Native American, Hispanic/Latino American, Arabian American, African American, Asian American, European American, and so on. Therefore, we need to know how to interact with other people from different cultures and to exchange and understand such differences.

Art is one of the most important parts in our history and cultures. Through art, people can know and imagine ancient people’s lifestyles, important historical stories, and unique customs. Also, artists put their thought and feeling into their artwork and viewers can catch them without direct communication. Art can become one of the great tools which helps people to exchange and understand cultural differences in intercultural communication. There is a unique organization in Seattle, the ArtXchange gallery, which promotes intercultural communication through diverse artwork showing different cultures around the world.

This paper explains why intercultural communication is important in our society and how people from diverse cultures can interact with each other. In this paper, through interviewing the director of the ArtXchange gallery and analyzing its website, we present how art is connected with intercultural communication and what are the advantages and disadvantages of exchanging and understanding culture differences through art.

2. Relevant Studies
What is culture? Defining culture is the first step to understanding intercultural communication. It is not simple. According to the study of Jandt (2003), nowadays cultures are not just about the political boundaries or races, such as Canada and the United States or Asians and Americans. Even in the same country, there can be many different cultures. Cultures refer to many aspects, such as experiences, thoughts, population, customs, behaviors, identity, and so on. However, Jandt argues that even though we know some culture, it doesn’t mean that we know someone’s personality from that culture.

When two or more people from different cultures interact with each other, many conflicts and problems can occur. Samovar (2004) defined that the circumstances including such incidents can be a result of intercultural communication (ICC). He suggested that people have to learn good intercultural communication skills to communicate with each other well in both domestic and international contacts since cultural differences are not only from different countries, but also from different internal cultures in the same country. Also, Hofstede (2002) stated that there are five barriers, such as language differences, misunderstandings from nonverbal communication, stereotypes, evaluation about other cultures, and a high level of stress, when people interact with other people from diverse cultures and countries. He suggested that we should try to avoid these barriers in order to have successful intercultural interaction and to exchange and understand cultural differences. Crannell (2001) also suggested that ‘Perception Checking’ is a great tool in ICC. In her study, perception checking is to clarify understanding about others’ perceptions as well as our own without making biased judgements.

Skybreak (2001) said, “Art has always been a social activity, engaged in by social beings, in a social context.” He believes that art has always been in human beings, such as cultures, science, and politics because many artists have expressed their thoughts and feelings about their cultures, which goes beyond entertainment. It means art represents not only artists’ unique styles or emotions, but also social, political, and cultural issues. Also, art is one of the best ways to communicate between different generations since we often analyze and figure out our ancient cultures through ancient artworks. Therefore, there is no doubt that art plays an important role in culture and society.

3. Method
To find what effects art has on ICC, we chose an organization which helps people to communicate with other people from different cultures, especially through art. The organization we chose was the ArtXchange gallery in Seattle. We analyzed the website of this gallery and interviewed the director of it, Cora Edmonds. She has had diverse experiences of ICC in her life. She was born in Hong-Kong, but raised in the U.S. She can speak multiple languages such as Chinese and English. Also, she has built intercultural experiences through working for international business companies. Now, she tries to represent cultural differences in her photographs as a photographer and to encourage people to exchange and understand different cultures through artworks from diverse cultures and countries in the ArtXchange gallery. Indeed, the ArtXchange gallery is different from the general galleries. Most artworks in this gallery are related to different cultures. Therefore, we expected to find the role and effect of art on ICC and our societies through analyzing this gallery and interviewing the director of it, Cora Edmonds.

4. Result
Through the interview of the director of the ArtXchange gallery, we found that she has great viewpoints and experiences in ICC. She mentioned that cultures cannot be compared with each other and each culture should be respected and protected. She also said that people shouldn’t try to change other cultures to the standards of their own cultures in ICC. Moreover, she keeps trying to broaden the connection of international artists and galleries and to promote the gallery to help people to have good intercultural experiences with art. On the ArtXchange website, we found that the ArtXchange gallery provides diverse services and events, such as diverse exhibitions, art auctions, book-signings and tea-tastings.

The ArtXchange gallery can contribute to the communication in intercultural society for several reasons. First, this gallery encourages diverse artists from different cultural backgrounds to share their artwork showing the uniqueness and diversity of their own cultures. Most artists are originally from different cultures and countries, especially Asia, even though some of them are living in the U.S. Also, this gallery cooperates with both local and international non-profit organizations related to intercultural communication. To differentiate this gallery from other galleries, the staff of the ArtXchange gallery try to choose artwork that exemplify and embody intercultural communication, rather than to accept all kinds of artwork. According to Director Edmonds, ArtXchange was a small gallery at first, but they moved it to the downtown of Seattle as it was becoming widely known. Now, this gallery is connected with many artists who show different cultural art styles.

Second, ArtXchange provides the online gallery, as well as the offline one. Edmonds mentioned that this gallery focuses on managing and updating the online gallery well because it can be helpful for people to indirectly experience a lot of artwork on the website. Indeed, we could appreciate many different styles of artworks and get the information of past exhibitions on the online gallery before visiting the offline gallery. However, she emphasized that appreciating diverse artworks in the real gallery is the best way to fully enjoy them since there are some factors which cannot be shown on the online gallery, such as their scale and movement. She showed an artwork of a japanese artist, June Sekiguchi, as an example of it. The tile of the Japanese artwork is ‘Silk Road Prayer Wheel.’ According to Edmonds’ explanation about it, this artwork is a kinetic and interactive sculpture which is related to the culture of the historic Silk Road regions. Therefore, it is not enough to appreciate this sculpture without seeing its movement and scale. Through touching and moving it directly and thinking about why the local people use it for prayer, viewers can understand their culture more than by just seeing some pictures of it.

Lastly, the ArtXchange gallery tries to show diverse cultural artworks from around the world. Edmonds said that one of the future plans of the gallery is to be connected with cultural galleries and artists in different countries. Also, she hopes that diverse cultural artworks from different countries will be exhibited in the ArtXchange gallery and that such efforts could help many people, especially in Seattle, to understand and recognize cultural differences in the world. Actually, in the coming exhibition, this gallery will show a variety of artworks of 13 regional artists who have the Asian Pacific American experience in the Pacific Northwest area. She said that it would be the beginning of the future plans.

5. Discussion
When we asked Cora Edmonds how art can be connected to culture during the interview, she answered that after people are born, they begin to see first before they speak. Then, a baby can communicate with their parents like seeing each other without a specific language. This means that people can easily understand and interact with other cultures through art even though they don’t know other countries’ languages. People from different cultures and countries can have some problems in both verbal and non-verbal communication when they communicate with each other for the first time without knowledge of each culture. Levine (1993) said, “People can and do create misunderstandings in conversations among people from different cultures.” Also, Samovar (2003) argued that non-verbal communication problems are not easily apparent and can be more serious than verbal communication. Art can help people to avoid such misinterpretation of different cultures since through exchanging art, people can know what the beauty of the other culture is and what the differences are between their culture and other ones, and be ready to interact with other people from different cultures and countries. Therefore, interacting with artworks can be one of the easiest ways to approach different cultures because people can understand them without learning languages.

Moreover, there are a lot of messages in artworks because artists can transmit the uniqueness of their cultures to audiences through their art. In the interview with the director of the ArtXchange gallery, “A language is just one way to communicate with each other, not an absolute way. Art can be another way to do so,” said Edmonds. She explained how to interact with other cultures through art, showing one of her photographs (Fig. 1). She took this picture at the Humla region in Nepal. In this picture, through the boy’s action and the background, people can imagine the greeting custom, clothing, and housing styles. Even through the color difference between his wrist and hand, people can guess the climate condition and living style of his neighborhood. Therefore, if they meet people from the Humla region, the probability of misinterpreting other culture can be decreased between them. In this respect, art is a very good method to understand other cultures without learning other languages and to avoid misunderstandings in both verbal and non-verbal ICC.

(Fig. 1. "Namaste," by Cora Edmonds, from ArtXChange)

However, there are two disadvantages in exchanging and understanding cultural differences through art. First, it is not enough to build great and strong ICC skills since it is indirect communication. Berwick (2000) examined how Canadian high school students acquire cultural interaction skills through experience. The study suggested that people can learn different cultures and improve ICC skills through experience. Therefore, to do the high level of ICC or to understand other cultures deeply, people should interact with other people from different cultures in person. Second, viewers can interpret in a different way unlike artists’ original purpose since people have different values and perspectives even in the same culture. For example, when some people watch the same movie, even though this movie is great to most of them, some of them may dislike it due to different preferences and viewpoints. Therefore, the power of diversity can cause people to interpret different cultures through art in diverse ways.

6. Conclusion
Through analyzing this gallery and interviewing Director Edmonds, we found that the ArtXchange gallery is an organization which contributes to promote intercultural communication in Seattle. This gallery is trying to encourage people to exchange and understand cultural differences through art, photography, and film, and provides offline and online gallery services, as well as extra events. Art is a very effective and attractive method for people to get involved in intercultural communication. Even though exchanging and understanding different cultures through art is not perfect, it is true that art is a very helpful tool to help people to understand cultural differences, especially in the beginning of ICC. Besides, if people experience different cultures directly, they will have great ICC skills without serious cultural conflicts. Furthermore, if the ArtXchange gallery focuses not only on Asian artworks, but also on European ones so that people can exchange and compare them more, it would play a greater role in intercultural communication than it does now.

References

1. ArtXchange Website (http://www.artxchange.org/about.htm)

2. Berwick, R.F., Whalley, T.R. (2000). The experiential bases of culture learning: a case study of Canadian high schoolers in Japan. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 24, 325-340

3. Crannell, E. S. (2001) Practicing Intercultural Communication. Dubuque, IW: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.

4.Hofstede, G. J., Pedersen, P. B., & Hofstede, G. (2002) Exploring Culture: Exercise, Stories, and Synthetic Cultures. Boston, MA: Intercultural Press.

5. Jandt, F. E. (2003) An Introduction to Intercultural Communication: Identities in a Global Community. 4th Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

6. Levine, D. R. & Adelman, M. B. (1993) Beyond Language: Cross-Cultural Communication. 2nd Edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Regents/ Prentice Hall

7. Samovar, L. A. & Porter, R. E. (2003) Intercultural Communication: A Reader. 10th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

8. Samovar, L. A. & Porter, R. E. (2004) Communication Between Cultures. 5th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

9. Skybreak, A. (2001) Some Ideas On The Social Role Of Art. Revolutionary Worker. Article No. 114-117, posted at http://rwor.org