As you know I just came back from Vienna, Budapest and Barcelona and with an overload of museums, I couldn’t help but notice that art is so inclusive. Every single type of body type is shown. All the things that we were taught to hate and fear are treated as beautiful. Beautiful enough, to be considered art.
In fact, if the sculptures or paintings of a nude person sitting down were done without a natural fold on her stomach, the art would be critiqued as unrealistic or called abstract. So can we start calling photoshopping and airbrushing, abstract? Because that’s what they are.
The art on the left is done by an artist called Botero. He is known for only painting fat bodies and he happens to be my parents’ favourite artist so I grew up seeing his paintings often.
When people see his art they don’t proclaim that he is “glorifying obesity” or “promoting an unhealthy lifestyle”. He doesn’t paint them to poke fun at fat people or to shame them into weight loss, his reason why is simply because he is “drawn to them”. So how are real life photos any different?
How are real life PEOPLE any different?
How can we respect a painting of a fat body but not the actual fat body itself?
Did growing up around Botero help me love myself more? Did it send me unconscious messages that being my size was OK?
Who knows… all I know is that growing up in Asia, it was nice to not be the butt of the joke for a change. #ScarredNotScared