What is art? I have considered this question so many times, but I could not come up with an appropriate answer to it. In a long time, I had believed that art is something that the majority do not have a chance to be connected with. Art is just for “artists”— those who could turn a piece of rock to David, or who could make an ordinary woman the perpetual Mona Lisa with a mysterious smile. I had also assumed that art is related to those things people can barely use: a vase from one thousand years ago displayed in the museum; a hyperbolic dress on a perfectly shaped model; or an abstract painting by a famous painter. Basically, I thought art was everything that was hard to understand and hard to afford.
However, is that true? Is art really far away from people’s daily life? As time goes on, I started to doubt what I used to think. Even though I still do not have an exact definition for art, I do understand better than before that what is art to me. Now, I believe that art is not the thing that is far away from people’s daily lives; it is not the thing that most people cannot afford; it is not the thing that is useless and meaningless to people. Instead, art is related to real life, and art can be seen everywhere in life. Art is developed from daily life. In my definition, (2)art is emotions, (3)feelings,(3) and experiences expressed by visual forms,(4) which contains photographs, paintings, buildings, etc., (1) and it can resonate with people who pay attention to it. Good art is something that can bound people together on some level, share some universal senses with people, and reflect some actual problems in our real world regardless of culture or country bound.
Generally, this is exactly what the Iranian artist Bahareh Bisheh’s series album does: resonating with people by reflecting a real problem in the world we live. Even though she is not a worldwide famous artist, her artwork touched a lot of people on internet. Despite the truth that Bahareh Bisheh is an Iranian, and she might mean to reflect some social problems in her world, I found her artwork was a mirror to my experience and the world I used to live—a world that lacked of mother’s love and guide; a world that was incomplete; and a world filled with fear for a young child.
Take the photograph “I have a mother” in Bahareh Bisheh’s album as an example. It is quite a simple picture: a few strokes chalk-drew hooded mother with a big warm smile on the cold and hard ground; a little girl