China I-Sights: Connecting Students in Charlotte and China Through Photography and Video
Exhibit dates: January 15 – April 12, 2009
The Light Factory’s Middleton McMillan Gallery
The Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film has coordinating a student art exchange program called China I-Sights that will utilize the medium of photography to engage teens in Charlotte and China in discussion about their daily lives and to break-down the stereotypes associated with Chinese and American culture.
The program will begin with lectures on the history and culture of China for students in the three participating Charlotte-Mecklenburg high schools. The students will then be asked to create one postcard with photographic images representing issues in their life and in their country. These postcards will be mailed to China where Chinese students will interpret these images and send back their written responses. The students in China will then repeat the process by creating their own postcards based on their own daily lives and mail them to the United States for the Charlotte students’ to respond accordingly.
In addition to the above, each student in both countries will be asked to create art pieces depicting a stereotype associated with the others culture, something they have absorbed over time or the first thing that comes to mind when they think of someone living in China or America.
After the postcard exchange is completed, the students from Charlotte will travel to China to meet their peers, tour the country and learn from first hand experience about the Chinese students’ lives and culture. We also hope to fly students and their instructor from China to Charlotte for the opening so they, too, can have a mind opening experience that will further break-down the stereotypical divide we experience simply through living so far away from one another.
Goal:
By learning how to interpret and create images and through media literacy, this program seeks to break down the stereotypes associated with Chinese and American culture. This program is part of The Light Factory’s on-going educational project “Dialogues in Social Tolerance”. Two previous programs brought students in Charlotte together with students in South Africa around the issues of segregation and integration and with students in New Orleans around the issue of rebuilding lives after Katrina. The power of imagery transcends language and cultural barriers and allows teens to communicate when words are difficult. Learning to sift through and understand how the media portrays other peoples through imagery is also an important tool for young people in today’s world. Additionally, by traveling to each other homes, the students’ understanding is able to go beyond the pictures they see on their TVs or in the movies.
The final outcome:
The exhibition will feature a dynamic wall, splitting the gallery into two halves--one side of the wall will be covered with Chinese stereotypes of American students and the other will be covered with American stereotypes of China. Some of the best postcards will be blown–up to a larger scale to cover the walls of the gallery. All of the postcards will be either suspended in space or hung in an interesting way that allows the audience to interact with them. The postcards representing the students own lives will be displayed throughout the perimeter of the gallery.
