A touring photographic exhibition, depicting the dramatic changes in China over the past 60 years, was recently displayed for two days in the Bastille building on campus.
The project, consisting of 300 photographs collected from over 7,000 Chinese scholars and students in the Netherlands, opened in a ceremony at the University of Amsterdam (UVA), where the Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun, along with Luo Ping, the head of the educational branch, Dr. Karel van der Toorn and former chairman of the Association Nederland China, Jan Kolkman, reacted positively to the contributions of seven Dutch universities.
According to the local chapter of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars in the Netherlands (ACSSNL), there are 150 academics currently studying in Enschede. Initial preparations for the opening started already in June when ACSSNL members began to collect images from individual contributors.
On display, a visual flashback of black-and-white photographs taken twenty years ago of Wuxi city, a metropolis in China's Yangtze river area, showed the stark contrast to recently captured images of a bustling downtown area where neon lights reflect in the old canals crisscrossing the city.
`We have gotten a lot of positive feedback to the exhibition,' says Liangling Shui whose own contributions included a rare, sketched portraiture of her paternal grandfather, Houcai Shui, which represented the oldest existing `photograph' in her family's personal collection. Prior to the 1970s, Shui's family did not even own a camera, and she remarked most people in her rural hometown of Dangtu, Anhui Province, only took photographs on special occasions, such as graduations and weddings.
It is likely that the exhibition, `Transition of China: Through My Own Eyes,' will enlighten and educate its visitors, bringing in clear focus today's modern China. Its ripple effect on university viewers, expatriates and the Dutch community cannot be overestimated. Researcher Shui commented: `I was born in the 1970s, and the changes in China positively impacted my life. The foods we ate changed from simple cereal to an abundance of different meat, vegetables and fruits. We used to walk and ride bicycles, and nowadays we use motorcycles and private cars.'
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| In the exhibition ‘Transitions of China: Through My Own Eyes,’ a sketched porraiture of Lingling Shui’s paternal grandfather was on display. |
The photographic exhibition began on September 28 and will run through October 28.
