German Expressionism

German Expressionism was developed in Germany during the 1920s. This filmmaking style focus on expressing the internal feeling of actors through the setting. Forexample, a disorganized apartment being used to reflect the disorganization in a character's thought. By using this technique, German filmmakers try to make a new approach to the movie which help to add mood and deeper feeling.

Some famous Expressionist films are The Golem (1915), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920) and Nosferatu (1922).

Nosferatu

The plot of Expressionism films mainly about intellectual topics such as madness, insanity. So, they have a different kind of viewers compared with traditional Hollywood films (with contents about love, action or Chinese kungfu) created for only entertaining purposes.

Expressionism then became an inspiration for other genres especially the film noir in 1940s-1950s. This genre often uses harsh light which creates a highly contrast between light and darkness, black and white. This use of light also appears in some horror movies later such as Alfred Hitchcock films.

The Big Combo(1955), a notable example of film noir

A scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Expressionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_%281960_film%29

Military Art

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier - Relief after the battle.

Military art is a kind of art which use battles as its main topic. These kind of pictures often express the courage of solidiers on the battle fields and the fierceness of war. Artists of this genre (known as war artists or combat artists) capture real battles in an artistic manner and use them as their inspiration for their work. I will show about some information about a notable war artist - Edward Bawden.

Edward Bawden

He was a British painter which served as an official war artist in Britain during WWII.

View from the enemy H.Q, 1941
His pictures were mostly painted by water color. From the above picture, we can see that Edward Bawden mainly focus on the landscape. He tried to capture the whole battle field in his paintings. With the usage of dark colour tone, he created a gloomy atmosphere in his paintings and I think it is the way he used to express the sadness of war.

Sébastien Chervel's website

I've just found this website on the Internet. It is belong to the guy named Sébastien Chervel who is a programmer and designer for interactive media. He has created a lot of interactive Flash movies and Japa applets to create online and offline experiences.

http://www.seb.cc/graffiti/index.html
This above picture is a Java applet of him. He created it based on the idea of collage. This application allows users to freely draw a collage based on 3 given pictures.

http://www.seb.cc/particles/index.html

This one simulate the attraction and repulsion forces between particles.

http://www.seb.cc/chaos/index.html

This one is called Chaotic Patterns. It have 8 defined patterns which are constructed based on 8 rules. The purpose of this application is to create the 9th patterns from the combination of the 8 previous ones.

Reference:
Sebastien Chervel's website, http://www.seb.cc/

Japanese Tattoo Art

A tattoo is a mark made by inserting pigment into the skin. In Japanese, it has other names such as irezumi or horimono. Tattoos often has a negative meaning in the Japanese society now and it references to yakuza (Japanese mafia).

According to archaeologists, Japanese tattoo has a long history with about 1700 years. The early settlers of Japan use tattoos to decorate their body and then tattoos were used to mark criminals. This action created a new class in the Japanese society including criminals and masterless samurai (ronin). They gathered together under organizations and creates which we called yakuza today.

Japanese tattoos is affected by the art in the Edo period. They are often derived from pictures at that time.

Ryu ni Oni (Dragon and Demon). This was the favourite motif for firemen in Edo

This tattoo was derived from the picture "Moonlight over Mount Yoshino".

This tatto shows one of the favourite actors of the 19th century at Kabuki theatre, Ichikawa Danjuro VII.

Reference:

http://www.artelino.com/articles/gallery-japanese-tattoos.asp

Grafitti

Grafitii is a word which has the origin from Italian. It is a kind of public art which people draw on walls, on vehicles and many public surface. Because of that, in most of cases, it is considered as illegal. Grafitti mainly focus on typography with unsusial and highly decorative fonts. Its contents varies in a wide range from political problems or just a name of the artist.

Grafitii's styles

• A "tag" is a painting of the artist's name using decorative typography. It is also used as the signature of the artist.
• A "throw-up" is a kind of painting which focuses of the drawing speed rather than the visual look of the picture. So, it often uses a little number of colors (3 or 4 colors)
• A "piece" is quite simmilar to a "tag" but it is more complex and need more time to finish.
• "Wildstyle" is the most complex style of grafitti. This style mainly appears on big walls or surfaces. It is the combination of letters, arrows, pictures, etc.

Examples:

Throw-up style's example

Wildstyle style's example

Vietnamese Grafitti

Although grafitti is quite popular in Vietnam, their contents are really poor. There are a lot of grafitto which have text in the format: somebody's name + "love" (text or image) + somebody's name. Artists don't use a lot of colors as well so most of pieces are painted in black and red (it is maybe because spray painters are not common in Vietnam).

This picture is from the Cynical Traveler blog.

This picture is a common type of grafitti although it looks more like advertising. Basicly in Vietnam, there are people who are hired to demolish house, building and other constructions. This is their advertisement which contains their mobile phone number and the text "Khoan Cat Be Tong". They paint their advertisement anywhere they can found. Therefore, their action is consider as illegal.

References:
http://www.compass-marburg.de/imgserver/mixed/galerie/haus/grafitti.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/activefree/78726113/in/set-1685349/

http://www.cynicaltravel.com/vi.htm

http://www.worth1000.com/entries/83000/83422tyBX_w.jpg

Modern Talking

Modern Talking was a German music band with 2 members - Dieter Bohlen and Thomas Anders. Thomas Anders is the lead singer while Dieter Bohlen is singer, song writer and producer.

It became popular from the 1980s with singles "You're My Heart, You're My Soul" and "Cheri, Cheri Lady". This band was very famous in Europe, Asia and South America. Especially, it was also popular in Iran where all other Western music was banned from 1979.

It wasn't so success in the United States as its "Brother Loui" can only rank 34.

In 1987, the band splitted up for the first time. Nearly 10 years later, Dieter Bohlen and Thomas Ander reunited in 1998 and they were immediately success. 2003, Modern Talking decided to disband again.

Modern Talking has a very special style of music which can be arranged as Eurodance. Some characteristics of this style such as the vocals are done by 2 singer, the lyrics about love, dance or emotion. Modern Talking's songs always have sweet melodies which are very memorable and easy to listen.

You can download Modern Talking music at here.

Chinese Comic

Chinese comics (or Manhua 漫画) has a history of more than a hundread year. The following picture is "The Situation in the Far East" from Tse Tsan-Tai who is a Chinese people. Some of them were also used in political purposes such as "The True Record" was used to against the Qing dynasty.

The Situation in the Far East, 1899

In 1928, the first Chinese cartoon magazine was created, the "Shanghai Sketch". After that, many magazines were published in Shanghai to. These magazines runned until 1941, when the Japanese captured Hong Kong, manhua activities were forced to stop. After world war 2, manhua magazines continued and Hong Kong became the biggest market for Chinese comics in the 1950s-1960s.

SeaTiger III, a Chinese comic published in Hong Kong

Look at the Sea Tiger III comic and compare with a British comic (the Beano), we can see that the Chinese comic style was affected by the Western comic style at that time.

The Beano, a British Comic in 1940

In 1970, Chinese comics focused on creating the theme of Kung Fu which the main characters were Chinese heros in the history.

And in from the 80s, many Chinese comics has influenced by the Japanese manga style. An noteable example for this is Bowling King, a Taiwanese comic which used drawing technique, the narrative and comedy scenes from Japanese comics.

The Bowling King