Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau's Nursing & Health Study Centre has successfully completed the ‘Certificate in Art Therapy and Nursing Care Course’! 14 participants from different fields have created a touching picture of life through the dialogue between heart and soul and art.
 
The programme brought together a diverse group of participants aged from 20 to 60, including doctors, nurses, occupational therapists, children's art educators, yoga therapists, art education students, and long-time charity volunteers. Each participant comes with different expectations: healthcare professionals looking to broaden their aesthetic experience and inject humanistic care into their clinical work; art students seeking cross-disciplinary social value fulfilment; and practitioners in other fields looking for ways to ‘recharge’ their batteries by focusing on their physical and mental well-being.
 
Designed for healthcare professionals and care-related workers, this certificate programme is based on the core theme of ‘life’ and takes participants on a profound journey of inner discovery through five carefully designed teaching sessions. The programme begins with a theoretical introduction to build up a basic knowledge of arts-based therapeutic education. Then, through interactive games, participants are guided to express their inner feelings through visual language. The art appreciation session covers poetry, visual arts and music, allowing students to appreciate classical works and expand their aesthetic and artistic experience in daily life. Creative art expression is the core of the programme, in which participants work with their own hands to transform their inner life experiences into concrete works of art. In the final group creation, exchange and presentation session, individual creations are transformed into a collective crystallisation of wisdom.
 
‘Healing and Education through Arts’ is different from ordinary “art therapy” in that it emphasises the universal value of aesthetic education in holistic education, treating art as a medium of expression and communication, allowing participants to experience the process of “heart flow” in their creations, and combining it with positive psychology to understand the value of the application of art in their lives. The programme is designed to inspire the inner feelings and thoughts of healthcare providers, allowing them to re-examine their relationship with life after a busy work schedule. Through the medium of art, participants were able to strengthen the connection between their inner meaning of life and the external world, learn to face the sorrows and joys of life with more positive emotions, and experience the beautiful state of freedom, emotion and self-sufficiency in their creations.
 
The most touching part of the closing exhibition on 20 May was the joint creation by teachers and students - a paper-cut collage with the theme of ‘love’. On this special night of ‘520’, teachers and students pieced together the memories of love on the ground, experiencing the true meaning of life through Process Art. Life itself is a process art. Like life, works of art cannot be preserved forever, but the interaction and feelings between people in the process of creation are real and important.