Photographs of the everyday home lives of Chinese students and scholars at Yale will be on view in a new exhibit opening on Thursday, April 19, at 5:30 p.m. at the Yale-China Association.
Titled "Yale Chinese: Images from Home," the exhibit is a montage of amateur photographs donated by Chinese students and scholars that, woven together, presents a view of Chinese culture. The exhibit, sponsored by the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Yale (ACSSY), is offered as part of Yale's Tercentennial and the centennial anniversary of the Yale-China Association.
"The purpose of the exhibit is to give the non-Chinese community at Yale a more nuanced understanding of who their Chinese colleagues are, where they came from, how they grew up and what their lives were like at home before coming to Yale," organizers of the exhibit wrote about the show. "Through this exhibit, the Chinese community at Yale hopes to reach out and bring back more friendship and understanding."
The project director of the exhibit is Dr. Wei Li, a skilled photographer who is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Medicine's Department of Surgery and one of the board members of ACSSY. He says that when ACSSY board members first conceived the exhibit in the fall of 1999, they were responding to the negative reverberations they felt in response to the Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade in 1999. They proposed a project that would foster understanding between Americans and Chinese by opening a window into the personal side of their lives, with the hope that this would encourage cooperation and friendship even in times of international friction, as well as open dialogue and cross-cultural collaboration.
All of the photographs were taken or collected by Chinese students, faculty members or scholars. According to Li, those who contributed hope the exhibit will remind people that "all nations, as irreconcilable as their political perspectives may seem, are made up of many individuals, each with wives and husbands, friends and aspirations." "Images from Home" celebrates this diversity and individuality within the Chinese community, he says.
Sociology professor Deborah Davis is the faculty adviser for the exhibit, which was also coordinated by Kun Gao, president of ACSSY and a doctoral candidate in statistics at the Graduate School; Shelley L. Stonecipher, director for development at the Yale-China Association; and Yichun Wu, a student in the graphic design department at the School of Art.
Gallery hours for the exhibit are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays at the Yale-China Association, 442 Temple St. The exhibit will also be open specially Friday-Sunday, April 20-22, 9 a.m.-5 p.m, for all Tercentennial guests. The exhibit will remain on view through July 20. For information, call (203) 432-0881 or visit the ACSSY website at www.yale.edu/acssy.
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