• EMU Concourse and Hearth Cafe, Lawrence Hall (2nd floor)
• January 25, 2009 - February 8, 2008
• 8am

Photography by four artists documenting Chinese folk art traditions

The Exhibit will be shown in two locations, exhibiting two artists at each venue:

Jan 25 - Feb 7 in Hearth Cafe at Lawrence Hall
Jan 28 - Feb 8 in EMU Concourse Level

Expressions of China includes thirty selected works by four young artists. In this exhibition, Ian Hernand, Blair Remington, Tomas Valladares, and Sharon Weaver illustrate through photography their Spring 2008 journeys through the rural villages of China’s Shandong Province and the larger cities of Jinan, Beijing, and Shanghai. These students traveled to document Chinese folk art traditions for ChinaVine, a larger research project presenting Chinese traditional culture to English-speaking audiences (www.chinavine.org), but their complex and rich stories evolved in their own contexts and became the work exhibited in Expressions of China.

In these revealing photographs, the artists explore a changing and dynamic country that celebrates its past, embraces its future, and is full of resilient, energized, and hopeful people. They observe the fluidity of that change and they capture their ubiquitous encounters with “the other.” They illuminate their experiences through enticing colors, lights, faces, buildings, and streets, and they create depths of understanding within their informative texts.