This study explores how five contemporary international artists who work and create artwork with “migration” as a theme, and how they have conceptualized their artistic and social identities through their personal experiences. Through these five artists, the study seeks to understand and explore how displacement is used as a technique to express their life experience. The five artists chosen to demonstrate this approach are Jacob Lawrence, Tracey Moffatt, Gerald Machona, Suh Do-Ho, and last but not least, Kimsooja.
I am going to write types of migration in earlier period with examples in Chapter 2 and then Chapter 3 includes types of migration as well but in contemporary period. In Chapter 4, I will explain the Displacement …show more content…
There are two major ways to classify migration in earlier times. The first is forced migration, which refers to the situation of persons who are forced to leave or flee their homes due to conflict and violence in their home country. There are different causes for forced migration: some are due to natural disasters such as tsunami, and hurricanes. Forced migration is also sometimes caused by huge development projects in the country, with one example being the Three Gorges Dam in China, where 238 families residing in the area were forced to leave their homes for the development of a hydroelectric dam. Forced migrations are also sometimes caused by slavery or war. Another type of migration, voluntary migration, is usually caused by personal desires of the human. People who often voluntarily migrate do so for economic reasons, and are searching for a better life. Some are opting for a better political system, marriage, or searching for a peaceful place to spend their rest of their …show more content…
Africans first arrived in America on August 1, 1619. A Dutch ship sold 19 Africans as indentured servants (not slaves) to Englishmen at Point Comfort (today's Fort Monroe), about 50km from Jamestown, Virginia. This was the very first shipment of African servants on record. Afterwards, imperialism began to spread across European countries and America, bringing competition among the colonial powers. The reason why imperialism began to spread in the early days is because many countries realized that they needed a large number of manpower to produce their goods in a quick time. In order to stay competitive, they are required to produce large number of goods in a short period of time, to remain efficient at the same time. This problem can only be solved by having cheap manpower and in large quantity, and slavery has been proven to be the cheapest and easiest way out. In all, about 10-12 million Africans were transported to the western hemisphere. The transport conditions were not favorable to the people and many died quickly before reaching their destination. This is a very cruel example of forced displacement as these Africans were forced to move from their home to another country to be slaves for white people. The population of Africans reached its peak before the American Civil War – 3,963,760 African were transported to America in 1860. Due to the many transportation of slavery in the past, many