ANALYTIC AND HOLISTIC APPROACHES

TO FINE ART EDUCATION:

A COMPARATIVE APPROACH

Dr. Simon Morley, Dankook University.


ABSTRACT
After four years teaching in university Fine Art departments in South Korea I
have discovered that pedagogic styles and methodologies, as well as
expectations, are very different from those familiar to me from studying and
teaching in my own country, the United Kingdom. Recognizing these deep
differences has led me to question what I see as certain covertly
universalizing tendencies within Western pedagogic conventions that conceal
valuable differences, and this is what I address here. Following the social
psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, I dene these differences under the rubrics
analytic (West) and holistic (East). I discuss how these different cognitive
styles affect cultures of learning, and conclude that South Korean pedagogy
in Fine Art has something to teach us in the West.
KEYWORDS
East Asian and Western cultures of learning. Comparative cognitive styles.
Analytic and Holistic. Metacognition. Complementarity. Fine Art education.


As globalization draws once far distant peoples together, the differences
between Western and Eastern cultures of learning come into higher and
higher relief. From a Western perspective, one of the obvious repercussions
of this cultural revolution in relation to the development of Fine Art education
is the presence of East Asian students on Fine Art courses in the West. From
an East Asian perspective, meanwhile, it means the presence within
academic cadres of these former Western-educated students, who are now
professors and have usually been educated at Masters level (and more and
more up to PhD level). But another signicant consequence is the presence of
Westerners teaching in English in Asia, as in my own case. Does this new
situation produce a melting pot of diverse cultures of learning, one in which
some kind of synchronization (Smith and Hun, 2013) occurs, or middle
ground (Ma, 2014) emerges? Is a meta-culture of learning on the horizon?
Or is the situation one in which an awkward mismatch between cultures of
learning causes confusion and misunderstanding, and produces decient
pedagogic styles and ill-prepared graduates?
South Korea is an especially interesting case in point as it is widely
acknowledged that education is one of the most signicant contributing factors
to the nations economic success-story. As a result, its system is eagerly
observed as a role model. However, at the same time, one of the most
frequent criticisms levelled at South Korean students studying Fine Art in the
West is that they lack the basic study skills required to succeed. (Cussans,
2008; Makhoul and Morley, 2014)
There is, of course, a complex and specic historical context to address,
which means that the evolution of Fine Art departments within South Korean
universities has taken an inevitably very specic form. But I will focus only on
broader differences within cultures of learning, addressing this problematic
issue from the perspective of a British teacher of Fine Art who is now teaching
in South Korea. I will also draw on my experience as an artist - an activity
that has made me acutely aware of the complex relationship between theory
and practice and as an art historian interested in non-Western art. I use a
very broad brush. I generalize by presenting for consideration two cultural
orientations: West and East Asian, and explore how these orientations have
developed contrasting approaches to teaching Fine Art.

1. Cultures of Learning
Western Fine Art pedagogy hopes to distinguish itself from other more strictly
academic disciplines where standardized testing prevails and deductive
reasoning dominates other kinds of cognitive processes by encouraging
creative, imaginative, divergent or lateral thinking skills. But at the same
time these Fine Art departments have become increasingly assimilated into
the wider academic infrastructure, and as a result nd themselves obliged to
adopt the kinds of pedagogic goals already established within more overtly
intellectual elds where the cognitive style is logical, objective, intellectual,
realistic, planned, discriminatory, structured and quantitative.
We can generalize by saying that within the Humanities in Western
academia the standard pedagogic requirement is that students acquire the
ability to verbally articulate a problem or question, and then come to a
reasoned, linear and unambiguous conclusion. This intellectual activity is
understood to be based on the possession and mastery of prior knowledge
within an appropriate eld, ltered through introspection and critical analysis.
This style of education is especially geared towards encouraging
metacognitive learning strategies - or how to apply thinking about thinking -
which means students must monitor their own learning and develop a broader
picture within which to understand their studies.
Western Fine Art education at university level has also come to value as
part-and-parcel of its culture of learning its students ability to clearly
articulate and sustain discursive expositions. The UKs QAA Subject
Benchmark Statements emphasize that a key goal in Fine Art should be
teaching students to analyse information and experiences, formulate
independent judgments, and articulate reasoned arguments through
reection, review and evaluation (2008: 4.4.2) As a result, students are
supposed to possess the ability to formulate reasoned responses to the
critical judgments of others, and to identify personal strengths and
needs. (2008: 4.4.2) Consequently, we can say that in the Western Fine Art
culture of learning the ability to conceptualize and articulate thoughts in the
medium of words is considered not simply a supplement to successful manual
work done in the studio, but its prerequisite. Critical thinking skills are
prioritized in Crits, for example, where students hone their ability to analyze,
judge, focus, converge, objectify, reason and draw clear conclusions through
presentations of their work to fellow students and one or more professor and/
or visiting artists or critic. Furthermore, while the nal year Degree Show, in
which students present a body of work, is considered a crucial aspect of this
culture of learning, it is supplemented by other kinds of evaluated outcome,
such as essays, texts, and reective journals or reports.
The underlying dynamics of knowledge and understanding in Fine Art
education can be addressed according to three categories: cognitive (mental
skills), affective (feeling or emotional skills and attitudes), and psychomotor
(manual or physical skills). Western art education is increasingly preoccupied
with assessing thinking within the cognitive category, and to neglect the other
two. It has shifted pedagogic attention away from process-based manual and
physical skills and onto the ideas and concepts informing these material
outcomes. The teaching of manual, psychomotor skills, through the use of
various techniques or the acquisition of established styles and skills is
neglected. Our culture of learning now also downplays or neglects the role of
secondary sensible properties in art making - those properties more closely
connected with the somatic, affective, emotional and valuing tone of
experience and attitudes. We prioritise primary intellectual properties
associated with the higher cognitive skills.
In contrast, within the South Korean culture of learning in general, the
kinds of analytic and problem-solving approaches backed by hypothesis-
evidence-conclusion style rhetoric that are typical in the West are less
important than the values of compliance, discipline and conformity, learning
by rote and conforming to hierarchies of knowledge and authority.
Standardized testing is the dominant pedagogic tool. This is a culture of
learning interested in tangible results, a goal-oriented approach to teaching.
But at the same time, a close and intimate relationship is promoted between
student and teacher, based on the deep-rooted Confucian belief in teaching
by example. As Judith Smith and Ran Hu (2013: 88) write, this means that
[s]tudents follow teachers instructions without question, value actions and
attitudes that affect their future, and are persistent and hard-working
[]The Eastern culture instils in teachers the responsibility of not only
teaching knowledge toward a particular subject, but also to educate students
to become people of virtue.

In relation to the teaching of Fine Art, signicant differences to the West
therefore exist. In the West, the presentation of a portfolio of work by a
student is a mandatory entrance requirement for study at BA level, but in
South Korea it is usual for students to sit an entrance examination involving
timed drawing and painting tasks. This means that psychomotor skills are the
focus of attention from even before a student begins undergraduate studies.
Within Fine Art courses less attention is paid to the development and
deployment of an overarching pedagogic methodology embodied in a
curriculum. There seems to be little intrinsic value attributed to a clearly
dened pedagogic structure that organizes planned instructional content,
materials, resources and processes for evaluation. Instead, however, great
emphasis is placed on the personal relationship that develops between
student and teacher. The teacher exercises considerable inuence over his or
her charges, inuence that often extends to students feeling compelled to
emulate their teachers own artistic style or conform to their tastes.
Compared to the artworks produced by UK students, those of Korean BA
and MA students are often of remarkably high standard in terms of technical
skill. But there is none of the discursively rendered evidence of how students
get there, as there would be in the West. In particular, critical awareness of
the relationship of students work to other artists, both historical or
contemporary, is not articulated critically or reectively. Such relationships are
only present within the works themselves, as embodied evidence. At MA and
PhD level the story is somewhat different, as a more concerted attempt is
made to encourage reective criticality, and as in the West, this involves
classes in theory and the writing of a dissertation. However, in my experience,
Korean Masters level and PhD students ability to analyze and contextualize
their knowledge, and to apply critical frameworks is very limited compared to
Western students.
In general, then, the South Korean culture of learning does not seem to
value the incorporation into the classroom context and evaluation process of
evidence of independent study and thought that might entail critical and
reexive approaches to their work, and to the organization of knowledge in
general. There is only a minor requirement for students to make available for
discussion and evaluation some kind of paper trail that is, accessible traces
or records of the thought processes that have gone into the making of nished
works.
Process learning the ability to learn through a series of actions,
changes or functions trumps other kinds of learning, but this too is not
recorded in any other way than within the nished works themselves.
Divergent cycles of the learning processes certainly occur, but they happen
in private. Divergent thinking, which contrasts with convergent thinking,
necessitates phases of critical thinking, and is based on a willingness to
attempt multiple solutions to any given problem, and involves the recognition
that unsuccessful solutions are also important to the thinking process.
Western Fine Art education seeks to catch such divergent thoughts and
actions within its pedagogic net, making it available for sharing and
evaluation, but in South Korea this style of learning occurs below the radar.
What is recorded are the convergent thoughts embodied in the nished work
of art.
Independent, critical, open-ended, ludic conceptualizations of the
thinking process are not shared or recorded discursively, and therefore they
are not available for discursive discussion or evaluation. As a result of this
style of pedagogy, we can say that teaching in South Korea tends to be
successful in encouraging and evaluating a students affective and
psychomotor skills.
But to Westerners, its pedagogy seems cognitively impoverished. And
yet it is obviously wrong to say that Korean students are thought-less. The
problem for Westerners is that by our standards the ways they think seem
overly lateralized, associative, diffuse, and visually-oriented. Korean students
show a great ability to visually articulate concepts and ideas through work
rather than merely in relation to it, and this means that thought processes are
internal to the artwork rather than external to it. But these nonconceptual
forms of thinking and knowing are difcult for Westerners to value. They seen
to involve a kind of dark or esoteric thinking.
But it is in relation to exactly these cognitive qualities that Western Fine
Art educational protocols are insensitive. In particular, in our Western culture
of learning we fail to adequately integrate psychomotor and affective skills
into some kind of functional and productive relationship with cognitive skills.
This is due to a deep-rooted cognitive bias that sets up a dualism between
mind on the one side and affect and body on the other. But, as the
philosopher Mark Johnson (2007: 234) stresses: The obvious fact that we
usually cannot put into words what we have experienced in our encounter with
an artwork does not make the embodied, perceptual meaning any less a type
of meaning.


2. Recursive Cultural Cognitive Styles
The differences in cultures of learning sketched above thus point to different
and deeply recursive orientations towards the world. The mind is an active
agent in relation to how it perceives and interacts with the world, and the self
creates reality just as much as it perceives reality, so what we experience is
not the actual world but rather a re-creation, an interactive experience of the
world that is the result of the conditioning of the culture in which we live. It is
possible to become so locked into seeing something in one particular way that
one will not be able to see any other pattern, or acknowledge the validity of
another point of view. But the value of any body of knowledge is limited to the
paradigm or gestalt - that produces it. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1945/1962: 18) writes, a horizon of meaning structures and delimits
consciousness. This horizon surrounds each situation, and is the limitation
placed on change. It is what allows us to adopt a perspective, but also it is
what prohibits us from being open to alternatives. As a consequence, as the
philosopher Thomas Kasulis writes in Intimacy and Integrity (2002: 22), a
study of Western and East Asian concepts of being, in one culture certain
experiences are considered the most interesting for analysis, the most
revealing of our basic humanity, the most fruitful to emphasize while in
another they might be considered common, not particularly revealing about
very much.
The research of social psychologist Stephen Heine demonstrates how
concepts of selfhood are determined by interactions with cultural environment
and ossify into recursive cultural orientations. He describes an East Asian
cultural bias towards what he calls the interdependent self - one in which
individuals are understood to be connected to each other via a network of
relationships. This Heine contrasts to the Western model of the autonomous
self, where selfhood is generated in contrast to others. As Heine (2001: 896)
notes:
In general, across a wide variety of paradigms, there is converging evidence
that East Asians view ingroup members as an extension of their selves while
maintaining distance from outgroup members. North Americans show a
tendency to view themselves as distinct from all other selves, regardless of
their relationships to the individual.

The individualistic West confronts the collectivist East, and as Heine (2001:
885) writes: the resultant self-concept that will emerge from participating in
highly individualized North American culture will differ importantly from the
self-concept that results from the participation in the Confucian
interdependence of East Asian culture.
Thomas Kasulis utilizes the terms integrity (West) and intimacy (East
Asian) to distinguish these same cultural differences on an ontological level,
while in The Geography of Thought (2003) the social psychologist Richard E.
Nisbett employs the terms analytic (West) and holistic (East Asian) in order
to contrast them on the level of cognitive style. In the Western paradigm,
Nisbett (2003: 158) writes, consciousness is construed as noncorporeal,
detached and autonomous. For Westerners, it is the self who does the
acting; for Easterners, action is something that is undertaken in concert with
others or that is the consequence of the self operating in a eld of forces. As
Nisbett (2003: 100) continues: to the Asian the world is a complex place
composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather
than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal
control. Meanwhile, [t]o the Westerner, the world is a relatively simple place,
composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention
to context, and highly subject to personal control.
Analytic thought, Nisbett writes, follows patterns organized through
visual segregation by dissecting the world into a limited number of discrete
objects having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways. He
details research that shows Japanese participants in experiments are more
attentive to the whole perceptual eld - that is, to the gure-ground continuum
- than American participants, who are more drawn to individual foci of
attention. This divergence is also paralleled in the structure of language. East
Asian languages are highly contextual - words typically have multiple
meanings, and the absence of personal pronouns in the Korean language, for
example, adds to its inherent ambiguity, and foregrounds the role played by
context in determining meaning. Western languages, in contrast, are more
context-free and preoccupied with focal objects as opposed to context.
Analytic thought credits the rewards garnered from an ability to provide clear,
detached, distinct, abstract, rational, objective information. Its epistemology
thus promotes a either/or binary model. As a result, it focuses on what
lends itself to being captured in language. (Nisbett, 2003: 157)
In contrast, holistic thought, Nisbett (2003: 211) writes, responds to a
much wider array of objects and their relations, and [] makes fewer sharp
distinctions among attributes or categories, [and so] is less well suited to
linguistic representation. Awareness of process predominates over the
search for essences or xed and nite forms. It thus presents itself as non-
binary, promoting a both/and approach to problem solving. In the this world-
view there is an intrinsic overlap between self and world, so that within the
position of the perceiver (and the maker) in relation to what is perceived (and
made) is not considered external. Instead, it is internal.
One way of observing these different world-views at work is to think
about how mind the part of the self that thinks, reasons, feels, and
remembered - is conceptualized within models of consciousness. Most
Westerners will point to their cerebrum when asked to locate the physical
location of this elusive entity, while most East Asians will point to the region of
their heart. Etymologically, the meanings of the English word mind cluster
around the act of remembering and memory, while the French word esprit
suggests another etymology that brings meaning closer to spirit, energy or
liveliness. But since Descartes introduced his inuential dualistic interpretation
of consciousness, upon which modern rational thought was established,
mind has been opposed to body, which explains why Westerners point
where they do. In contrast, the Chinese written character translated into
English as mind is composed from the ideogram for heart, for since ancient
times the heart was understood to be its location, and so the two are
interchangeable and inextricable. Both concepts of mind are congruent with
the contrasting analytic/integral and holistic/intimate world-views from which
they arise: in the former, the self is detached from a world that is viewed as
static and compartmentalized, while in the latter, the self is corporeally
immersed in the ow of life.
The clear benets to be gained from both paradigms explain their cultural
recursiveness. The Western model has the following broad characteristics: it
fosters an intellectual attitude, preoccupied with mental activity and values,
differentiating intellect and psychology from the somatic dimension. Emphasis
is placed on analytic thought, which means experiences are processed by
being abstracted, and divided into elemental parts or basic principles. The
discursive mode of thinking is valued, in which thoughts proceed to a
conclusion through deductive logic, reasoning, and objective analysis rather
than emotion and intuition, promoting a cognitive style uninuenced by
personal feelings or opinions when considering and representing facts. It
thereby ensures grounds for publically veriable objective facts freed from
affect. This world-view fosters self-consciousness and reectiveness, and
generates the idea of a transcendent realm of pure forms or non-material
entities, of a God who is separated from the natural world.
The East Asian world-view, on the other hand, offers the self a greater
sense of being united with a trans-personal whole. It fosters awareness of
complementarity and intimate connectedness. Furthermore, it is somatically
oriented, seeing the self as immersed in a living, bodily and participatory
context. Ontologically, there is the notion that the self exists in the midst of
things rather than externally. More attention is paid to affect - to pathos as well
as logos - as a component of knowledge, and this leads to the
acknowledgement of the value of non-verbal understanding. Some important
knowledge is construed as essentially esoteric or dark, rather than bright
and clear. Epistemologically, this means non-duality or monism. Distinctions
between subjective and objective therefore have little value. Metaphysically,
it fosters the idea of an immanent spirituality, occurring in the here-and-now.
Detrimental consequences of these recursive paradigms are that when
thinking Westerners tend to be uncomfortable with emotions, the noncognitive
realm, and with understanding the relationship between material things and
actions. We over-value an ability to present clear, distinct, rational, objective
and analytical ideas through the medium of verbal language, believing that if
we put our thoughts and feelings into words, we are in control. Furthermore,
failure to realize these criteria signies lack, and loss of mastery. The
atomization of selfhood into individualistic autonomous units isolates the self
from the wider community, fostering potential antagonism between the
interests of the self and the social realm.
Because of the East Asian bias, meanwhile, the self within this cultural
matrix tends to be uncomfortable with the analytically cognitive, and with
abstractions. As a result, there is an absence of individual, reective, affect-
free critical thought. Because much cognition is understood to happen beyond
the scope of language, within the discursive domain there is a tendency to
depend on shared tacit knowledge that remains unchallenged and under-
articulated subjectively. This means a proclivity towards reliance on the
consensus view and shared viewpoint, rather than on individualized and
potentially dissenting expression (Kasulis, 2002: 132).
In relation to Fine Art particular, the Western paradigm provided grounds
for mediating the artist as someone separated from the world. It thereby
fosters a sense of artistic autonomy - the idea that art is a subjective addition
to the world. And in contrast to the objectivity fostered in other epistemological
elds, this has the effect of encouraging the subjective element in artistic
consciousness, and the idea of individual freedom of expression (Kasulis
2002: 132). However, in contrast, when it comes to in assessing the meaning
of work of arts, such dualism lead to discursively intellectual and detached
properties of thought prevailing over emotion and subjective response. An
artwork is separated into discrete, structural parts, and the goal is to identify
content as something distinct from style.
In the East Asian paradigm, meanwhile, an attitude is fostered that sees
art as expressing an intrinsic overlap between the self and the world of others,
and creativity is understood to arise from this interaction (Kasulis, 2002: 132).
Nonconceptual, visual and practical thinking is valued, and is considered
fundamentally concrete; it exists in relation to a material or physical form. This
kind of aesthetic attitude is involved in processes of knowing that cannot be
separated out into elemental parts and then re-organized into new wholes.
The thoughts expressed within a work of art are the result of responding to
materials and processes of making rather than of abstracting and organizing
thoughts that exist anterior and exterior to the work itself. When confronted
with a work of art this way of experiencing and interpreting does not see a
collection of discrete parts that can be divided up. There is no division
between style and content. Thus the East Asian world-view fosters a greater
sense of unity between theory and practice, style and content, through the
assertion that practice is theory-in-action, or style is the performance of
content.
The limitations inherent in these different orientations can also be seen
played out within their cultures of learning, especially in relation to the
intrinsically manual and visual activity of Fine Art. Western Fine Art pedagogy
seeks to incorporate into the curriculum strategies that supply students with
the kinds of multi-tasking and transferable skills, and technological know-how
increasingly required to function within contemporary society. However, in its
quest to engage with a wider vision of Fine Art and its role in society, this
culture of learning risks failing to equip graduates with any skills in particular.
In contrast, South Korean Fine Art teaching is still very much focused on
teaching mastery of single task skills within the traditional disciplines.
More profoundly, Western Fine Art pedagogy applies to a dualistic
approach in which concepts - as part of thought - are pitted against feelings
and imagination, which are tied to the body. As Mark Johnson (2007: 216)
puts it, the Western paradigm aligns meaning with the cognitive and thus
dismisses quality, feeling, and emotion from any account of meaning (italics
in the original). And as he emphasises this is especially debilitating in relation
to the domain of art, where it is images, patterns, qualities, colours, and
perceptual rhythms that are the principle bearer of meaning. There is
therefore always a risk of disjunction between theory and practice, of being
able to account for what Johnson (2007: 234) calls embodied, immanent
meaning. Underlying this is problem in linking making and thinking, crafting
and knowing, and in adequately interpreting how raw things are transformed
into stable and ordered forms through the imagination mixed with bodily
actions. As a consequence, writes the communication theorist John Shotter
(2008: 192):
In the arts, we seek the content supposed to be hidden in the forms before
us, by offering interpretations to represent this content. In short, we
formulate the circumstances in question as a problem requiring a solution,
or explanation that those, sitting in classrooms or seminar rooms, can see
or picture as matching or as tting the facts.

Within South Korean Fine Art pedagogy, on the other hand, there is
disregard for the role of cognitive skills in relation to affective and motor skills.
This is because of the absence of the dualism that dominates the Western
paradigm. Less epistemological value is attributed to the ability to stand back
and analyze thought-processes into clear, distinct, linear patterns.
Furthermore, making translations between the discursive and the manual is
problematic because this paradigm cannot see the sense in articulating the
one within the space of the other. It does not recognize inherent merit in
reective criticality and the use of metacognitive strategies.
Research undertaken by Richard E. Nisbett give practical demonstrations
of how such cultural differences play out in relation to educational
methodologies when the holistic mind nds itself stranded within an analytic
context: the Western classroom, for example. He describes an experiment
designed to test the possibility that East Asians nd it relatively difcult to use
language to represent thought: Kim [the Korean psychologist in charge of the
test] had people speak out loud as they solved various kinds of problems,
Nisbett writes. This had no effect on the performance of European
Americans. But the requirement to speak out loud had very deleterious effects
on the performance of Asians and Asian Americans.
Thus when East Asians are transported into the orbit of the Western
culture of learning they seem to Westerners to be cognitively decient. But as
a consequence of the research he has conducted, Nisbett (2003: 212) is
compelled to asks:

How should one educate Asians and Asian Americans in American
classrooms? Is it a form of "colonialism" to demand that they perform verbally
and share their thoughts with their classmates? Would it have the effect of
undermining the skills that go with a holistic approach to the world? Or is it
merely common sense to prepare them for a world in which verbal
presentation skills, even if it might be difcult to achieve them, will come in
handy.


3. Metastability
The famous ambiguous gure of an old woman/young woman reveals
cognitive styles at work on a perceptual level, and how they directly connect
to the ways meaning are constructed. In the Western world-view, based on
the analytic mind, it is necessary to distinguish each gestalt and to prioritize
one of them: it is either a young woman or and old woman. Dualism prevails.
To accept the equal validity of both is to fall into a paradoxical contradiction.
But in the East Asian world-view, as Kasulis (2003: 158) writes, the challenge
posed to cognitive mastery by such ambiguity would be articulated as
presenting the viewer with:

(a)a gestalt picture that can be either old woman or young woman but which
I am going to discuss here as old woman, or (b) a gestalt picture than can be
either old woman or young woman but which I am going to discuss here as a
young woman. That is: the analysis would not begin from poles of intimacy or
integrity; rather, the two would emerge out of their overlapping in medias res.
As with yin and yang, one pole could never exist independently of the other.
The balance between the two would contextually shift so that one would
sometimes predominate over the other but at other times would be
subordinate.

We thereby enter a kind of meta-gestalt. Aware that nothing in his
environment has changed, as Thomas Kuhn (1962/1996: 114) writes in
relation to another ambiguous gure, the duck-rabbit, someone directs his
attention increasingly not to the gure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the
paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without
seeing either of the gures, and he may then say (what he could not
legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that
he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit.

Metastability is one way of describing the benets of an ability to shift
between gestalts. In The Complementary Mind (2008) the neuroscientists J.
A. Scott Kelso and David Engstrom discuss how it is now recognized that,
cont r ar y t o cl assi cal West er n assumpt i ons concer ni ng l ogi c,
complementariness lies at the centre of many important cognitive processes.
They propose the use of the grapheme tilde or squiggle (~) as the symbol for
a way of thinking that prioritises the equivalent or complementary relation as
opposed to the contrary, dual or oppositional. The squiggle is not merely
oneness as opposed to multiplicity; it implies non-duality rather than
uniformity or synthesis. They thereby hope to lay the ground for a mode of
analysis that reconciles such apparent contradictions, dualisms and binary
oppositions. As Kelso (2008: 9) writes:

Metastability, by reducing the strong hierarchical coupling between the parts
of a complex system while allowing them to retain their individuality, leads to a
looser, more secure, more exible form of functioning that promotes the
creation of information. Too much autonomy of the component parts means
no chance of their coordinating and communicating together. On the other
hand, too much interdependence and the system gets stuck; global exibility
is lost.
Metastable complementarity is intrinsic to the East Asian paradigm. The
Western analytic paradigm resists the metacognitive stance in relation to
world-views; it must make a choice, and create binary oppositions. While the
Western model can only see a choice from the exterior point of view from
a condition of duality - the East Asian holistic model inhabits complementarity
from within.
Over the past century both the traditional Eastern and Western world-
views have been challenged from within and without. One obvious
consequence of these challenges is that concepts of mind have undergone
signicant transformations. In the West, we have begun once more to
incorporate the body into a general picture of consciousness. As Merleau-
Ponty argued, for example, the self must be understood as connected to the
world by a web of interrelated embodied sensations, for the body is involved
in a multi-sensorial dialogue with the world what Merleau-Ponty (1968)
called in his later work the esh of the world. This sense of rooted being-in-
the-world, he argued, means deep pre-reective involvement with our
surroundings, prior to any concepts or reection, and so there is an
indivisibility of seer and seen, a densely woven fabric of experience in which
body and things are linked and are no longer ontological opposites. But this
idea of the embodiment of mind is something long familiar to the East Asian
world-view. But here there has been a shift in the opposite direction: aspects
of Western-style dualism now undergird East Asian societies who are set on
the goals achieved through applying the algorithms of instrumental reason.
East Asians are learning to consider that words are the proper and most
valuable bearers of meaning. They learn to think in terms of an individualized
subjective self who is opposed to an inert objective world, to analyze and
organize, to downplay meanings that are noncognitive and embodied, and
to consider valid knowledge to be something exclusively objective.
As James Elkins (2008: 1) writes, in discussions of art we are now more
inclined to acknowledge that [s]eeing is embodied, and that it should no
longer be separated from touching, feeling, and from the full range of somatic
response. To a large extent, such a recognition has come hand in hand with
transformations in contemporary art. Synesthesia, Einfhlung, empathy and
sympathy, immersion, performance, and embodied encounters are now
central to the art experience, writes Elkins (2008: 1). Art is involved in eliciting
feelings, emotions, intuitions, sensations and affects as well as functioning as
a discursive semiotic code. Even the most abstract and intellectual activities
are affected by drives or energy, and so primary intellectual properties take
their place beside by secondary sensible properties - those more closely
connected with the somatic, emotional and valuing tone of experience, and
attitudes rather than knowledge. Thus, for example, as part of a broader
strategy to recast the interpretation of art as something experienced as
sensation, Gilles Deleuze (2003) argues that arts power lies in its ability to
create affects independent of content or meaning. It exposes the viewer to an
impersonal, differential ow of life that is felt rather than understood or
comprehended.



4. Conclusion
As Smith and Hu (2013: 89-90) write in relation to broad teaching goals in the
twenty-rst century:

Prior to the year 2000, the emphasis for educating students was to promote
the three rs reading writing and arithmetic; today, in the 21
st
century,
educators have a new charge: teach the new three rs rigor, relevance and
real world skills [.]. Educators agree with business leaders and other
interested groups that specic skills are needed for students to succeed in life
in the 21st century of global communication, social networking and a world of
new technologies.

The inuential educationalist Ken Robinson (1982; 2001) argues that the
Arts are crucial for the success of this new task because ideally they serve as
domains within which the aesthetic experience can be explored, encouraging
all the senses to operate at their peak. But instead, in Robinsons opinion, our
cultures of learning mostly have the opposite effect: they offer an anesthetic
experience that deadens students to the wider spectrum of consciousness
and fails to prepare them for participation in our complex digital world. In this
context, Fine Art education at university level should be playing a major role in
preparing students to be the creative and integrated citizens of the twenty-rst
century. It should be serving as a role model for other academic disciplines,
rather than being obliged to conform to standardized criteria grounded in the
instrumentalist goals of academia as a whole.

Within the multiple meeting-places characteristic of contemporary global
culture, differences vie with the forces of homogeneity. But in his seminal The
Location of Culture (1994) Homi Bhabha argued that previously autonomous
cultural orientations are now contested both from within and without, and
creativity lies within the obscure and uid realm of hybridity where cultures
meet and merge, displacing meaning to the indeterminate liminal zone of the
culturally in-between, to the interstices the overlap and displacement
domains of difference [where] the intersubjective and collective experiences
of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. (Bhabha,
1994: 2) The broad context for my discussion, therefore, is not so much
irreconcilable cultural difference or some clash of civilizations as a situation
within which worldviews are becoming more permeable to each other.
Ultimately, the value of making the kind of cross-cultural comparison Ive
attempted will lie how it looks at where ideas overlap and meet but also where
such meetings cease and trying to understand why.
Fine Art education is caught between on the one hand the need to
conform to wider academic criteria and on the other remaining true to intrinsic
aesthetic criteria that set it apart from other disciplines. The imperatives of
the intellectualized academic approach vie awkwardly with the needs and
skills generated by affective and psychomotor activity. The Western culture of
learning values orderly, systematized and divisive processes, and downplays
the noncognitive, somatic, performative and participatory the realm of
expressive bodily movements and changes that the East Asian culture of
learning in Fine Art better understands.
A stronger - that is, more exible - kind of pedagogic approach would be one
that brings the insights of the East Asian culture of learning grounded in
intimate embodied meaning, social interdependence and holism, into contact
with Western insights grounded in dualism, detached analysis, and individual
integrity and autonomy. As Nisbett (2003: 212) observes, two advantages of
East Asian cognitive skills stand out: (1) the fact that Asians see more of a
given scene or context than Westerners do; and (2) the holistic, dialectic,
Middle Way approach to problem-solving. Nisbett believes the former is
something that can be taught within a Western context. However, he is less
sure if the second is open to pedagogic attention, because it is so deeply
rooted in a fundamentally different worldview. But Fine Art departments,
East and West, could be spearheads for a hybrid analytic~holistic metastable
culture of learning that returns the aesthetic experience to the heart of
education - an experience that is intrinsically more attuned to the cognitive
skills Nisbett pinpoints as an inherent aspect of the East Asian world-view.
This would lead to a metaculture of learning that brings cognitively
structured, critical, reective thinking, and independent and active learning
together with a less cognitively structured and more object-oriented approach,
directed towards the perfection not only of the cognitive but also of the
affective and psychomotor skills.



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