Hello!

I am Olivia Blessing, author for and manager of DeceptivelyBlonde, A Life Savored, One Ear in the Past, and Students Ramblings (as well as half-a-dozen other blogs). If you have come from one of those, thanks for following me! And if you are new, please feel free to check out the other sites!

I am currently a professor of Business, Law, and Ethics at a university in China, where I am devoting myself to the language and learning more about China’s history and culture. In December 2013, I received my J.D. (Law Degree) from the University of Iowa College of Law. There I specialized in International/Comparative Law and Cultural Resource/Art Law; a process which included multiple trips abroad to China, Japan, and South Korea, along with hours spent pouring over their museums and cultural sites.

Still, with a B.A. in English and a B.A. in History: International Studies, it’s no wonder that history and cultural resources are where my heart lies. I would love to work with this area of international and foreign law or serve as a professor on the subject, and I spend a great deal of time researching topics and looking up articles. I have published my first article, discussing the artifacts looted from the Summer Palaces in China during the Opium War and China’s efforts to recover those items.

“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”

~~Matthew Arnold

To establish a couple definitions I work from (please be aware that these definitions may be widely disputed):

Art is fundamentally anything that is invented for a use that goes beyond merely the functional application. Take, for example, a decorated chair. The design of the chair may be art. The decorations may be art. The function of having a place to sit does not make it art.

Cultural Resources on the other hand go beyond mere art–though often they are one and the same. Cultural Resources are those things that reflect a culture’s heritage. It might be that a plain chair is a cultural resource, merely because it represents to the world the fact that a particular culture invented this kind of chair at a particular time and it became part of their culture’s heritage. Think of a museum—everything within them are cultural resources. They can be written, painted, invented, designed, told, and woven. These items are what remain of who we were, reminding us of who we want to be.

While I am fascinated with many cultural backgrounds, I have finally narrowed my research in on Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultural history (predominantly Chinese at the moment, but it is closely tied to the other two). Nonetheless, I am actually interested in all types of art or cultural resources news. Since I’m constantly researching and running across interesting articles or news involving art or cultural resources, I thought I would share them with you. Sometimes I’ll post my own thoughts, sometimes I’ll comment on other’s thoughts, and sometimes I’ll just post links to articles worth noting.

Feel free to wander around; I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I do!