麻豆社

Good morning.

A new exhibition opens this week at Somerset House in London, looking at how cuteness has become a powerful cultural phenomenon. From emojis to unicorns and from the humble pet video to the Barbie film, the cute aesthetic is impossible to escape. On TikTok alone the hashtag #Cute has been viewed over 620 billion times.

An exact definition of cuteness may be difficult to pin down, but its impact is far reaching. Even faith communities aren鈥檛 immune from its viral qualities.
Like many people, I鈥檓 in dozens of messaging groups with family and friends, and messages fly back and forth all the time. Every morning without fail, my grandmother will send me an image of one of the Sikh Gurus with a floral background and a quote from the scriptures. She hasn鈥檛 made it or put it together herself. Instead, she is forwarding it on after receiving it from someone else. By the end of that day, that image will probably have been sent on to me by 2 or 3 other people, all using it as a means of engaging with their faith.

Using images as a focal point for meditation or prayer isn鈥檛 new to Sikhs, and the community has a rich artistic history and heritage, as the collections at the V&A and the British Museum amongst many other institutions amply show.

It is possible to distil the complexities of faith into basic teachings, but for me it can鈥檛 be reduced into a set of pretty looking pictures. Sikhs might see a risk of idolatry in the overuse of such images, and the emphasis is instead on learning to read and understand what the scriptures teach without the need to rely on others. It鈥檚 a direct relationship with the Divine.

There is also the danger that technology can manipulate images to present a particular version of Sikhi which is not correct. In a video created by AI circulating at New Years, you鈥檇 be forgiven for thinking that only men with long beards and turbans count as Sikhs, that all Sikh toddlers are pale skinned and must also wear full turbans, and that women and men cannot be in the same building for prayers. AI鈥檚 biases had pushed out the Sikh concepts of egalitarianism and diversity for the sake of a nice, cute video which was very shareable but didn鈥檛 speak to the heart of Sikhi.

The Cute exhibition goes on to explain that sharing images on social media has become a form of communication in its own right. As the saying goes 鈥渁 picture paints a thousand words.鈥� However, as the Sikh saint Bhagat Kabir says 鈥淭he Almighty painted the great picture of the world. Forget this picture, and remember the Painter. This wondrous painting is now the problem鈥�. The world is complicated and images can be deceptive, and words often paint a better picture than an image ever could.

Show less