Leadership ≒ Creativity
They are very similar. Leadership is mainly about how to get people to do what they want. They require powerful impressions, and must stand out from all others. Creativity also is about being different from the surrounding. Both leadership and creativity captures attention, and conveys a powerful message through the masses.
I will stress out that creativity mentioned here is positive creativity.
In this blogpost, I would like to talk about a recent incident that gave me a strong impression on creativity.
So I was with my friend at Kichijoji. We went to a pleasant restaurant and on our way home decided to go and have a look at the contemporary wall painting in an alley near a parking lot.
We were blown away.
The painting was packed with so much color and detail, that it took us a very long time to understand what exactly was written on it. Actually, I am still not sure what is drawn on the wall. But nevertheless, we were intrigued by the powerful strokes of the graffiti painting.
We became engaged in a conversation on what the "message" was in this particular art. I told her that there used to be another painting on this wall which was covered up by the old one. She, having lived in the US, told me about the wall paintings that she saw back in Penn. They were called Mural art, and was sometimes drawn to cover up explicit graffiti. She told me that although crude words, they were messages of the people living on those streets, and it is not a very good idea to cover up their cries to the world.
I recalled two paintings that came up in Dan Brown's new book "Inferno".
The two paintings in the "Hall of Five Hundred"
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| The Hall of five hundred is the famous hall located in the heart of the town hall of Florence, Italy |
These two paintings on the wall were originally to be done by the two most famous artist of the Renaissance, Leonardo Da vinci and Michelangelo. However, their paintings were left unfinished and was later covered up by Giorgio Vasari. The cries of Leonardo and Michelangelo were muffled up and lost to the new layers of plaster. We only know how their unfinished paintings looked from sketches done by other artists in the time of the renaissance.
When I mentioned the futile attempts of recording a shadow of a lost piece of art, my friend mentioned one Mural art which painted a shadow of a church that used to exist there. I could not find a photo of the wall art, but had recently seen it somewhere in a design magazine. When the church was taken down, the people decided to paint that wall with its shadow in memory of the building.
This made me remember the unnerving shadows in Hiroshima.
These are not artworks. They are the shadows of the people who were there on that fateful day when the atomic bomb fell. Their bodies were instantly disintegrated, but their shadows were permanently imprinted on the concrete. Their physical self has been gone for decades, but even today, we can feel their souls trapped on this staircase.
Okay, the last image may have nothing to do with creativity.
But recently, I have started to see messages in artworks. Not just artworks, in daily objects as well. I think that human life as a quest. A quest to search for what message you are trying to convey to the rest of the world. Some people know it from the start and can leave their marks on the wall, such as that graffiti art in kichijoji. Others realize through a collaboration with many people, after large personal events. Some, like owner of the shadows in Hiroshima, do not even know that they have left a message behind. Sometimes, they are covered up by others. Sometimes, they remain for eternity. Creating a strong message that remains in the heart of people forever. This is my creativity.
