Digital Comic Strip in Progress

I drew this, it's part of the project that I wrote about before on the blog - the comic strip. This image describes the punishment of the wealthy people, kneeling on broken small pieces of glass in 1950's China. Many people died from the punishment and some escaped to the United States. This is how the story ended. I just wanted to put this on the blog to show the progress.

In the other comic I'm working on, I'm imagining a new ending. It's more peaceful.

I drew all the images this week. next week I'm going to scan them into the computer so that I can import them into a really cool program that lets you make digital comic strips.

I can't wait to see the whole thing finished.

How Do You Define Human Rights?

Through the years my ideas about human rights have changed. I grew up with the perception that human rights violation happened in countries distraught by war and corrupt politicians. The media has presented human rights violation as torturing prisoners and murdering entire villages and I easily accepted the idea that this had no relation to my environment. That changed when I took notice of what was going around me. I have come up with my own definition on human rights: The right to feel safe.

For Example, a ZeumMaster left her purse near the programing station in Main Gallery and later found it at the bottom of the stairs with all her belongings stolen. She lost her phone, her iPod, but more importantly she lost her sense of safety. Having your belongings stolen - Could that be categorized as a human rights violation? When we're in an environment where we feel completely comfortable, having something as unfortunate as this happen makes the experience that much worse. You have the right to feel that not only you are safe, but your processions are as well. Although some may not agree I would categorize this event as a human rights violation.

It could have happened anywhere. And I love Zeum. But I just want to say that even your safe places can be violated.

I'm doing a documentary project where I'm interviewing Zeum staff members and strangers and using their experiences and their definitions of human rights to create a video. I'm going to record them as they answer the following questions: How would you define human rights? What do you need to feel safe? Have you ever felt unsafe?

I hope to show that feeling safe is a simple right that everyone deserves. Human rights violation does not have to be as intense a physical torture, for it to make someone feel uncomfortable. Everyone has stories and I want to share them.

Creating a documentary will not only give me the opportunity to use a video camera and edit, but using real stories with real people will create a strong message.

End of the Reel: last day at zeum

This is my final blog post. My internship is coming to an end and my last day is May 16 so I decided to write a blog comparing my first day to my day yesterday and see how I have changed from this internship.

My first day at Zeum I had no idea of what I was getting into I knew no one but my mentor. I didn’t know if I would get along with any of my co-workers and I didn’t think I could handle the 7 hour days. It is very strange how things can change it 12 weeks.

My first day on the job I was very reserved and just talked to the people I knew, which by the way were my classmates and fellow interns. After my first day I had no clue if I was even going to enjoy my time here.

As I look back to yesterday and compare it to my first day I can give a big smile. I am going to miss all my co-workers, the happy kids and their families, and my mentor. Over the 12 weeks of work I have been able to develop a professional and personal relationship with everyone there. Hanging out in the office, the main floor, eating lunch with the other interns, can’t forget watching the Matthew and Perry singing and dancing. I would really like to thank all the staff for making my internship exciting and always making ready to come in.

Finally I want to talk about my project. My project to me was simple but ended up being very hard. I felt that editing a movie of teens playing games was going to be a piece of cake. First of all I just like to edit - it is a passion for me. Here, the part that got hard was that I didn’t understand any of the footage. I also didn’t understand how important it was to the teen interns and to Zeum in general.

After having 2 meetings with my mentor and director of the intern program I knew it had to be good. Still I wasn’t moved to try my hardest. In fact it was after meeting the other teen interns and seeing their reaction I put all my effort to making it good for them. This project taught me that it is important to think of others because one small thing to me can mean a whole lot to the others.

I want to thanks the ZeumMasters who made working there a good time for me.

Chili Fritos Memory: My Sister

What I'm writing here is more stories for my memory project.

This is a picture of my oldest sister, Erica and I. We are in Detroit Michigan at this time. It's very hot out there with not enough oxygen in the air.

When my sister Erica and I were little, I would come home from my elementary school across the street from my house. I would be coming from my after school program after six and I always would see the ice cream truck as I crossed the street. Because my sign is a virgo and I love to hustle positively, money would always be in my pocket.

When I stop the ice cream truck by raising my hand like I'm in class, I would always get the same thing and never try anything new, "chili fritos". If I'm having a bad day, after eating chili fritos, my day is automatically brightened. The good thing about chili fritos is that they were cheap, you could buy them from the ice cream truck for a dollar.

Sometimes before I would eat them, I would go in the house and put them on the table to go to the bathroom and wash my hands. My sister Erica would be sleep on the couch, having the TV watch her instead of she watching the TV. I would go to the bathroom come back and my chili fritos would be on the table empty. I'd wonder who ate them because there was only my sister Erica and me in the house.

After five more times of this situation happening, I started to figure out a plan to "catch" that person eating my chili fritos. It was obviously easy because I would act like I would go to the bathroom and instead, hide under the table where my chili fritos were and end up "catching" my sisters Erica not eating my chili fritos but gobbling without chewing. There went my chili fritos down to her stomach. I had a camera on me so I immediately snap-shot my sister for evidence. In the end, all we both could do is laugh.

Mama Memory

My memory project begins with two pictures of my mom.


This is a new picture of my mom, dad, and little new born baby brother. My mom's name is "mom"! My dad's name is "dad"! My new born baby brother name is Jeremiah. My mom and I are very close. I remember there was an entire month when my mom just wanted to take off of work just for me and spend time with me by going to lunch. I appreciated that so much.

I felt like an only child. As my mom and I kept going to lunch throughout the month, I was wondering why she chose me to spend time with. Did I need special treatment or something? What? But that was not the case. The case was that she felt like I was her only son, not only child and that she don't see me as much as she does the girls (my sisters) because I'm always running around or with my dad.


My mom is the best and I'm glad she gave me life (having me was hard work is what my mom told me). I also appreciate my mom giving most of her genes, very outgoing and learning how to make a good impression on new people I meet. Cheers, to mom!

I have a lot more pictures to write about. Pretty soon I'm going to start the recording so that you can hear me, Joshua, telling this story.

Imagining Peace in Comics

When I was 15 my mom told me about the land reform movement in China in the 1950's. I'm now 19. She'd lived in China during that time.

I was interested in the Children of Jerusalem exhibit, which is about the Israeli/Arab conflict and is why I wanted to do conflict resolution for my final project. It was after looking at that show that I started to remember my mom's story. So I decided to do the story that my mom told me because it was related to the Children of Jerusalem, conflict and resolution, and it was happened in the real live and it was took place where I was from, China.

Land Reform is about redistributing arable land, whether previously collectivized by the state or held by rich farmers. The farmers are forced by the government to give up their land at prices thats unfair. Landowners evicted the farmers without their consent, and that's why they were so rich. The goals of Land Reform is to take from the rich and give to the poor, reducing poverty, expanding rural development, or returning land to it's previous owners.

I was inspired by the show of the Children of Jerusalem, and I like the symbols that they used in their paintings. Birds. flags, the colors, wall. mystery, sea.

My thing is that I like comics a lot, so I wanted to make a comic strip. My favorite is Case Closed. So I'm going to draw and make a comic strip about the land reform conflict. I will be also using symbols and some text like what the Israeli and Arab children did for their paintings. First, I will draw it on white paper with pencil, then go over with pen, and color it. Cut it out and paste them on a bigger hard cardboard.

I've already sketched out the two comics. What you see here are those rough sketches. I did two pages, one is the conflict as it happened for real and the other one is how I think it could have ended more peacefully. The conflict is that during the 1950s in China, the people were equal, but the wealthy people made the scale unbalanced. So the government needed to do something about it, and it was to punish the wealthy people by forcing them to kneel on the broken small pieces of glass. Thats what the original ending was. But i want to make an alternative ending to it to make it a peaceful conflict resolution. Instead of punishing them so harshly, I want to free the people and take their money and give it to the poor. So there's no violence and everybody is equal.

I used a scale to show the unbalance of the rich with paper money and a Chinese dollar symbol on it, and poor with only coins. At the end, I will draw white birds flying over the balanced scale to represent peace.

I want to show people that violence can't solve problems. People have to work together to make a resolution. To compromise.

Zaijian Zeum

Zaijian (JI-Jee-en) is "Goodbye" in Chinese.

W.O.W. I can't even believe tomorrow is my last day at Zeum. Almost every single weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, I've been working here since October. Both days all day.

It's going to be weird for me waking up next weekend, knowing that I don't need to rush to work. Working at Zeum has been fun. There are always people who need help, and with my staff shirt on, they would come up to me and ask for help. It felt so good to help them. It was very cool when I taught the kids how to make animations, or a mask, or how to use photoshop, which had been new to me last october. Their creations always surprise me.

I've had to say no to my friends when they asked me out on weekends. or sometimes, after a tiring week of school, I've had to come to work instead of staying home and resting. I'm a busy girl. I usually felt tired when I'd think about coming to zeum at the beginning of the day, but always, after an hour or so, I'd realize I was enjoying myself. How many people can say that about work.

I never thought I'd have the communication skills, photoshop skills, and lots of art skills that I learned here. I've always been a girl who's not into drawing or art. but Zeum had inspired me. i learned that there are other ways to express myself besides drawing. Singing, making clay, photoshop.

Zeum has prepared me for the real world. Like how a working life is going to be. From 10:00am in the morning working all the way till 5:30pm toward the evening. I am glad that I have tried this. I have no regrets. I mean, I did lose lots of time during weekend from resting or hanging with my friends to working...

Everyday working here, there've been surprises and new things to learn about. It's been cool. and honestly, it's worth it.

This place, i will remember it forever.

Zaijian. 再见

Or hopefully, just "see you later".

Documentary in the Making

Hey this is Michael M.

This year I am senior in a very small high school in Oakland. Each senior is making a year long project related to their internship. Mine is Zeum and I also go to a video program after school. I get a lot of support in video making in my after school program called the factory and at Zeum. So my project is a documentary on myself and how I grew from a shy person in school to a person that loves to express himself in front the entire school.

This documentary isn't any ordinary documentary with interviews and narrative It will be told in a very dense poem I made that expands the entire four years (of high school). This means that what you see on the screen is words telling my story = a poem. There will be images in the background too. This is what makes it a documentary. It will include personal stories that I experience that I never told anyone else but myself. So it will be a personal Peace about my life so that people can relate to. Right now I just finish the first rough draft and I am so excited about it because its building up right in front of me.

Through Struggles,
Challenges,
I made me. - a line from my documentary.

Zeum staff are really helping me a lot with organizing my timeline for my project. I feel I get a lot of my creative ideas here. When I work in the music video production lab I pay close attention to the educator who is instructing the kids. I pay attention to the type of background the kids would choose and the costumes they wear. I aways wonder if those fit together if they would look right in front of a camera. I will be thinking about that in my mind. It's like a puzzle - what works, what doesn't. Even though my video is all words, this is still inspirational because I can look at the colors and think about how to use color in mine.

For example, one day a group of boys were making a music video - two of them were wearing a bird mask and one was just rapping. They had some kind of lava background and I saw that it worked well with their costumes since their mask were red and orange. It gave me ideas about what I should add in my documentary.

I hope that my movie will turn out great. To be continued...

Basketball Memory

My final project will be finishing my memory project: "How i almost gave up". I'm still working on scanning pictures into the computer of my three sisters, my mom and dad, my two little brothers, and me. I'm going to tell people as they look at the pictures that this is a family full of joy, that they don't have to worry about us.

When my family was split up, it caused my sisters' heart and mine to be broken. It's hard to explain what went wrong with this family that was split so lets just say that life was too good to be true for me and something bad just had to happen because it felt like I was in utopia. That's the way I remember it. Then utopia switched around to be anti-utopia. However, experiencing anti-utopia till today isn't all that bad but I still pray that it will go back the same and feel the same as it did before.


For my last blog post I talked about my brother, this time = my dad.

Yeah! I said basketball is my favorite sport/ i love it when i dribble up n down the court/ I like to pick and roll/ I like to give and go and its basketball/ Josh Mauldin let's go!-words from Bow Wow, the rapper.

Here you can see pictures of the shoes I wear playing basketball. I bought them all black and decorated them myself. I made a hat to match too.

These words apply to me because basketball is my favorite sport and my dad taught me most of my basketball skills. My dad and I are super close and one of the activities that we love to do together is play basketball, basketball, and basketball, obviously. Ever since I was three years old I've been playing basketball and once my dad payed attention that I could better my skills, he pushed me into being one of the best at any school I went to. So every school I've went to or go to now, I'm one of the best.

I don't like bragging because if you know you're good, whats the point of bragging. I know you're wondering how do I know I'm one of the best at my school. Is it because everyone else isn't that good? Well no, its because I push myself more than others and my dad and I always talked about me wanting to be one of the best at what I do. A tip that I can give you if you haven't already heard, that my freshman basketball coach told me was that, "Practice doesn't make perfect"-"Perfect practice makes perfect".

I will be speaking in a recording to tell whoever wants to listen about "how i almost gave up".

Creativity Explored visits Zeum

"Through art, many find voice for the first time. The work they create is uncensored, fearless, innovative and fresh."
- quote from creativity explored brochure

My first day back at Zeum after a long list of leave requests met me with the opportunity to hear about Creativity Explored. Catherine, a friend of Mathew, came in this morning to speak about a local bay area organization, Creativity Explored, a program that works with mentally disabled adults, helping them create art. The pictures you see are from their website: www.creativityexplored.org.

She began by describing the various disabilities many of the artists have, ranging from autism to down syndrome and their ability to create amazing art with their different physical and mental obstacles. Catherine then walked us through various pieces of art and how they came to be, describing the artists and their specific stories. She explained that each artist had their own unique style and most used the repetitive colors and shapes throughout their pieces. I remembered thinking that if i had seen these in an art gallery i would have never thought that the artists had disabilities. They were that good.

Mathew then brought up the issue of communicating with people who have different needs. How do you communicate with someone who can't talk? I thought about it more and more, how could this possibly work. I related this to life at Zeum. Children come in all the time too shy to attempt anything. Some kids just need a little inspiration, others an example or two, and some kids would rather you walk them step by step. Making it simple, is the way I usually handle the oh so common "I'm not good at singing" or "I can't make that" or "How come my character didn't come out like that" pointing to the collection of infamous Miguel clay characters.

I admit i feel the same way as these children do, I limit my creativity ability based on my past experiences with art. There was always someone who had a more popular collage in the fourth grade or a more impressing combination of similies and metaphors in my seventh grade poetry exhibition. Catherine brought up a good observation, many of these artists are so talented and unique because they aren't affected by others. They create art without questioning themselves because they don't worry about the times or the latests trends.

I was inspired.