CIE Cultural Studies students establish their own 'way of seeing' by 'retouching' masterpieces

About thirty Cultural Studies students recently gathered at the cutting edge painting studio of the Academy of Visual Arts at HKBU Kai Tak Campus, pledging to ‘re-define’ beauty in those beautiful but complacent masterpieces in art history ranging from Renaissance frescos to postmodern simulacra, from ‘Mona Lisa’ to ‘Marylyn Diptych’, and from Christian asceticism to commercial hedonism.
    
Having been through one and a half years’ cultural theory training, our young masters re-examined these great works of art with marked confidence and perceptive insights. While unmistakably lamenting the loss of ‘aura’ in the mechanical reproductions in front of them, they ruthlessly challenged against such highbrow art’s self-righteous representational forms and aesthetic values, establishing hence their own unique, contemporary, and intertextually informed ‘ways of seeing’ – to borrow both Kristeva’s delicately-defined jargon and Berger’s BBC terminology.