Feature: A Different Way of Thinking

Culture is the agglomeration of values, customs, and communication systems identifying groups of people, where demarcations can be geographic, economic, intellectual, or even neurological predisposition. In this paper, I shall discuss Autism Spectrum Condition as a mental culture, and investigate Self-Other identities from the perspective of a researcher-artist with Asperger’s Syndrome. Autism is widely portrayed by the general media as stereotypes exhibiting bizarre behaviour. Why is autism considered an aberrant existence? In reality, autistic individuals grapple daily with the complexities of Self and Other. Assimilation and communication is very much based on the autistic individual’s ability to grasp and ‘perform’ alien systems and realities. How much should we conform to the cultural tenets of Other at the expense of Self for the purpose of convivial integration, and how much to attend to Self for the sake of intrinsic preservation and need?

In the push for a more enlightened co-existence, some questions require address. When is co-existence considered cultural migration and when imposition? We are often strangers even in our own ‘homes,’ perennial actors and performers of Other, and thereby losing understanding and appreciation of Self. Should it be a compliment or insult when someone declares, “But you can’t be autistic, you don’t look or behave autistic?”

Perhaps a transdisciplinary approach to this conundrum is in order – one that will facilitate understanding and reciprocity between Self and Other. Continue reading →

A Thin Fine Line

Posted on May 12, 2013 by dawnjoyleong

This is a musing about invasion of privacy and the thin fine line between funny and sinister.

When one has been accorded much care, consideration and respectful support from a great number of people, one may become not only quite overwhelmed, but also lulled into a feeling of security, such that when this sense of ‘safeness’ is challenged, one becomes suddenly unsure how to react. One incident was highlighted in my previous post, “Confronting the Invisible.”

Recently, I have been encountering a series of little events, each one so minute in isolation that only the very observant or meticulously private person would react to, let alone notice at all. I have tried hard, in deference to the more prevalent “hey, relax!” laissez-faire social perception of the majority, to downplay in my own mind, each of these events which nevertheless irked me greatly. However, now that I am faced with an escalating rate of recurrence of these ‘small things,’ and the accumulation of which are forming a disturbing but as yet nebulous denouement with an accompanying mixture of utter weariness and foreboding, I am finding harder and harder to brush them all off. Continue reading →

Confronting the Invisible

Posted on April 9, 2013 by dawnjoyleong

Guardian Angel

This is a musing about confronting, and the confrontation of invisible disability.

What happens when the invisible is confronted in a stark and abrupt instant?

A recent encounter inside the lift on my way up to my art studio brought me once more, eyeball to uncomfortable eyeball, with the conundrum of ‘framing’ an invisible neurological difference. In my case, it is autism – and this is an issue that autistics living in the normative realms are constantly faced with, because we exist and function in the midst of, and juxtaposed with, the ‘normalcy’ of neurotypical constructs and systems. Continue reading →

Thinking Through The Body – a multimodal approach from autism

Posted on January 14, 2013 by dawnjoyleong

Paper presented at the International Conference for Research Creativity: Praxis, Baptist University of Hong Kong, 21-23 November 2012.

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ABSTRACT

How should the artist approach practice and research without becoming so overly abstract that the grounded, proprioceptive concreteness of art becomes mired inside oppressive, draconian intellectualism? The reciprocal processes of researching artistic practice and practicing artistic research require actively synergetic, symbiotic sensory and cognitive engagement, the interaction and inter-reaction of the bodily senses with theoretical, philosophical insight and invention.

Sensorial contemplation, that is, “thinking through the body,” is an inherent trait of Autism Spectrum Condition. How do autistic sensory, proprioceptive and cognitive idiosyncrasies affect creative motivation and process? May the model of autism inspire a fresh perspective for research and praxis? As an artist with Autism Spectrum Condition, the aims of my paper are to provide an ‘insider’ view of how sensory and cognitive idiosyncrasy shape my creativity, and using the autistic body-mind model, suggest an alternative milieu for creating visionary collaborative research, and mutually empathic platforms. Continue reading →

Art in a Hidden World – creative process and invisible anomaly

Posted on January 14, 2013 by dawnjoyleong

** Note: This article is more than ten years old, and contains some outdated terminology. My ideas and perspectives have grown, evolved and shifted since, but I am presenting this unedited as a documentation of my journey.

Paper presented in The Arts in Society 2012 conference.

First published by The International Journal of the Arts in Society: Annual Review, Volume 7 (2013), p. 29-39; and in the The International Journal of Arts Theory and History, (Common Ground Publishing).

Art in a Hidden World – creative process and invisible anomaly.

Dawn-joy Leong, 2012.

Abstract:
What are the semiotics and meanings of art to a small, hidden sector of society with sensory and cognitive anomalies? How do these idiosyncrasies shape creative process? Much attention is now centred on Autism Spectrum Condition. Researchers in the fields of neurology and psychology are presenting more and more discoveries, as a growing community of autism self-advocates and associates are finding increasingly louder voices in the media and online. Inevitably, claims, counterclaims, heated discussions and bitter disputes abound. In the area of artistic creativity, there has been great interest in the particular talents attributed to individuals with autism. Books, articles and papers are being published on this subject, and an assortment of therapies aimed at developing these abilities are being proffered, while parents grasp at any and every suggestion of hope and reassurance about their children’s latent potentials. However, most of the postulations and assertions emerging about autism and creativity are from the non-autistic observer, and there are, to date, very few practising artist-researchers with autism stepping up on this platform rife with confusion and controversy to present their ideas from the personal vantage point. As an artist and scholar with autism, my interest in the area of multimodality in art is very much entrenched in my idiosyncratic sensory and cognitive profile. The aim of my presentation is to provoke more consideration towards the multisensory dimensions and potentials of artistic practice, as well as make a fledgling contribution of much-needed autobiographical empirical perspective on autism traits and the creative process. For the purpose of concrete illustration, I shall provide a brief overview of my most recent work, Scheherazade’s Sea, as an example of how sensory anomaly and neurodiversity shapes my creativity as an artist-researcher with Autism Spectrum Condition.

Keywords: Autism Spectrum Condition, Creativity, Hypersensitivity, Sensory and Cognitive Idiosyncrasy Artistic Process, Multimodality, Multisensory

Continue reading →

The Importance of Personal Perspectives

Posted on May 28, 2012 by dawnjoyleong

The study of Autism Spectrum Condition is about humans. It is about neurodiversity in humans, who possess a wide range of human emotions, sensory and cognitive abilities or disabilities. Autism is also a very heterogenous condition, which makes research from any homogenous perspective most difficult, if not impossible.

Where, in the grand scheme of things, this current breathtakingly accelerating pace of ‘scientific research’ in Autism, does personal perspective fall? How important is personal perspective in Autism research? Continue reading →