This book explores Asian art therapist experiences in a predominantly white professional field, challenging readers with visceral, racial, and personalized stories that may push them far beyond their comfort zone. Drawing from the expertise and practices of Asian art therapists from around the world, this unique text navigates how minority status can affect training and clinical practice in relation to clients, co-workers, and peers. It describes how Asian pioneers have broken therapeutic and racial rules to accommodate patient needs and improve clinical skills and illustrates how the reader can examine and disseminate their own biases. Authors share how they make their own path—by becoming aware of the connection between their lives and circumstances—and how they liberate themselves and those who seek their services. This informative resource for art therapy students and professionals offers non-Asian readers a glimpse at personal and clinical experiences in the White-dominant profession while detailing how Asian art therapists can lead race-based discussions with empathy to become more competent therapists and educators in an increasingly diversifying world.

This edited book documents how the field of art therapy is taking shape as both a profession and a discipline across Asia. It explores how art therapists in the East are assimilating Western models and adapting them to create unique and inspirational new approaches that both East and West can learn from.

As art therapy rapidly makes its mark across Asia, this book documents how the field of art therapy is taking shape as both a profession and a discipline in this region. It looks at how art therapists in Asia are assimilating Western models and adapting them to create unique home-grown practices. Building on theory, research and practice that has been developed in the West, practitioners throughout Asia are creating innovative art therapy programs that reflect cultural diversity and draw on ideas from Chinese medicine and Eastern philosophy, spirituality and art traditions. With chapters from leading art therapists and community artists in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Thailand, China, India, The Philippines and Singapore, this book pulls together thought-provoking perspectives and effective approaches from which East and West can both learn. The first of its kind, this book will be an informative and inspiring addition to the bookshelves of all art therapy professionals and students, as well as anyone with an interest in Eastern cultures and cross-cultural working.

This wide-ranging collection of essays examines the arts of Southeast Asia in context. Contributors study the creation, use, and local significance of works of art, illuminating the many complex links between an object's aesthetic qualities and its origins in a community.

The Wiley Handbook of Art Therapy is a collection of original, internationally diverse essays, that provides unsurpassed breadth and depth of coverage of the subject. The most comprehensive art therapy book in the field, exploring a wide range of themes A unique collection of the current and innovative clinical, theoretical and research approaches in the field Cutting-edge in its content, the handbook includes the very latest trends in the subject, and in-depth accounts of the advances in the art therapy arena Edited by two highly renowned and respected academics in the field, with a stellar list of global contributors, including Judy Rubin, Vija Lusebrink, Selma Ciornai, Maria d' Ella and Jill Westwood Part of the Wiley Handbooks in Clinical Psychology series

A body-focused, trauma-informed art therapy that will appeal to art therapists, somatic experiencing practitioners, bodyworkers, artists, and mental health professionals While art therapy traditionally focuses on therapeutic image-making and the cognitive or symbolic interpretation of these creations, Cornelia Elbrecht instructs readers how to facilitate the body-focused approach of guided drawing. Clients draw with both hands and eyes closed as they focus on their felt sense. Physical pain, tension, and emotions are expressed without words through bilateral scribbles. Clients then, with an almost massage-like approach, find movements that soothe their pain, discharge inner tension and emotions, and repair boundary breaches. Archetypal shapes allow therapists to safely structure the experience in a nonverbal way. Sensorimotor art therapy is a unique and self-empowering application of somatic experiencing--it is both body-focused and trauma-informed in approach--and assists clients who have experienced complex traumatic events to actively respond to overwhelming experiences until they feel less helpless and overwhelmed and are then able to repair their memories of the past. Elbrecht provides readers with the context of body-focused, trauma-informed art therapy and walks them through the thinking behind and process of guided drawing--including 100 full-color images from client sessions that serve as helpful examples of the work.

Art Therapy for Social Justice seeks to open a conversation about the cultural turn in art therapy to explore the critical intersection of social change and social justice. By moving the practice of art therapy beyond standard individualized treatment models, the authors promote scholarship and dialogue that opens boundaries; they envision cross disciplinary approaches with a focus on intersectionality through the lens of black feminism, womanism, antiracism, queer theory, disability studies, and cultural theory. In particular, specific programs are highlighted that re-conceptualize art therapy practice away from a focus on pathology towards "models of caring" based on concepts of self-care, radical caring, hospitality, and restorative practice methodologies. Each chapter takes a unique perspective on the concept of "care" that is invested in wellbeing. The authors push the boundaries of what constitutes art in art therapy, re-conceptualizing notions of care and wellbeing as an ongoing process, emphasizing the importance of self-reflexivity, and reconsidering the power of language and art in trauma narratives.