BLOOM Unravel art education
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At around 8 am, students carrying bags with art supplies entered YunHua Fang Art Studio located in Saratoga, California, walking past sculptures and drawing props covered in dust, and sat down with their sketchbooks on tables covered in black plastic sheets. Against a backdrop of newspaper articles and winning records on the classroom walls, Teacher Yunhua Fang started the class by critiquing his students’ work. “Your tone of the work is too gray, I can’t see the contrast. Focusing on the details but drawing as a whole,” Fang Laoshi said as he examined the student’s work projected on the TV, marking the work digitally through his mouse. From day to night, the sound of pens brushing through papers filled the whole studio. Fang does not tell students the exact answer to how they should solve problems in their work often but gives them a guideline to discover the solution themselves. Yun Hua Fang Art Studio has been educating generations of students for over a decade. s Located in Saratoga, next to Cupertino in Silicon Valley, most of his students come from Chinese families. Uncountable parents hold high expectations of their children, and students typically come with strong artistic ambitions. For this reason, the studio has a reputation for its high student acceptance rate to top 30th colleges.
Fang offers various types of classes for different age groups and art methods. Six drawing classes including basic skills and human anatomy courses; Western and Chinese painting classes; five creative classes for different levels, and a Charcoal drawing class. The intense teaching job requires him to have two classes operating at the same time. Fang is relatively strict with his students, especially with those who have high goals. He often pushes students to the next level by pointing out the insufficient in their work directly, helping them to reach “perfection” in techniques and the ideas behind the works. Under Fang’s guidance, he created an unbelievable record with a hundred percent acceptance rate with more than 400 students being accepted into top colleges including Ivys. He helps students craft portfolios to showcase their uniqueness and creativity; indeed, encouraging free thinking and expression, combined with harsh training, makes his students highly competitive. As an immigrant from China who was educated at the China Academy of Art, Fang combines Western education beliefs of unlimited self-expression and arousing one’s self-consciousness in art with Eastern practices of studying diligently and training assiduously. He advocates inspiring students and igniting their passion, using art education as a medium to cultivate students’ creativity.
“Art should be said to be an expRession of the soul.” -- YunHua Fang freestyleacademy.rocks | Freestyle Academy Spring 2024 Vol # | 3