Visual culture art education and art therapy: an approach to understanding images created by young adolescents in a classroom environment

This study is about understanding images of popular visual culture created by young adolescents in a Hong Kong school context. It adopted a phenomenological case study method to investigate the images created by eight students from a low band secondary school, in which students participated in a manga creation program. The study suggested a matrix for the investigation that stressed investigating the meaning of the images young adolescents create through their art creation experiences, the reasons for creating images in the particular way, and the way of interpreting their creation process. The study found that there were two types of aesthetics in the image of popular visual culture affecting young adolescents’ image creation: the stereotyped aesthetics and the counter-stereotyped aesthetics. They not only affected young adolescents’ artistic representations, but they also influenced the representation forms of the images of both sexes. Most importantly, they revealed a psycho-cognitive learning process for self-transformation. Each had its specific functions and meanings contributing to understanding images. The matrix demonstrated a self-actualised and self-autonomous ecological system formulated by the socio-cultural context and individual real world problems, in which young adolescents sought solutions to their real world problems through being sophisticated in drawing skills and techniques. The study indicated that the matrix was also an ecological entity of both the visual-image based learning and the psycho-cognitive understanding. Within the ecological system, young adolescents self-actualised to seek an ideal icon from the Japanese manga to represent their identities, examine their stereotyped and counter-stereotyped aesthetics as well as the particular artistic expression in image creation, and project themselves onto the images. The study also found that the matrix was constructed by three stratifications and independently established by each young adolescent, in which he or she encountered various self-transformation experiences. Under the socio-cultural context, they looked for the aesthetic unity and the individual artistic style according to the individual psychological need to reach the peak experience for self-transforming.