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VineOnline is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and events from ChinaVine team members

Traditional Masks | Beijing Opera Art’s College

When ChinaVine team member, Jordan Lynton, began researching the Peking Opera the summer after her freshmen year at the University of Central Florida, she never imagined that two years later she would be in Beijing sitting in on a martial arts class at the Beijing Opera […]

Through a Different Lens

Sam Gehrke documenting noodle making with Mr. He

ChinaVine emphasizes the importance of educating English-speaking children, youth, and adults about the material and intangible culture of China. Of equal importance are the first hand experiences associated with the researchers, such as Sam Gehrke, who gather ChinaVine’s impactful material.

For Gehrke, currently a senior […]

Jiangou Village- Red tourism

Jiangou Village- Red tourism A small village located near the Miaofeng Mountain 50 miles outside of Beijing, Jiangou is an emerging tourist destination. While the temples on the mountain are used by religious pilgrims, Jiangou caters to a different kind of pilgrimage, those individuals who want to feel more connected to their communist roots. Red […] […]

Zhang Jianhua

”Very few works speak to social problems. Chinese contemporary art doesn’t make people understand. It has lost its function and its very important social, avant-garde, and revolutionary features.”- Zhang Jianhua Zhang Jianhua is a contemporary sculptor known for being controversial. The subject of his work often involves poverty, exploitation, and death. Through his four sculptural […] […]

dispersal

We’ve finished the fieldwork/residency phase of the field school, and rather successfully at that! Now we move on to various locations: Shanghai, Tsingtao, other parts of Beijing, or all the way back to Oregon. We will reconvene at the beginning of August—from wherever we all are—in order to process fieldwork materials into ChinaVine content (initially […] […]

Field school progress…

At this point, we are more than halfway through our Beijing-based, ChinaVine-driven field school, and everything is moving along according to—and in many ways, exceeding—our plans. As co-directors, we spent many hours planning and imagining the experience we’d like students to have in Beijing, the whole time realizing that, ultimately, much of the experience would […] […]