Art festival draws artists and experts to Beijing this fall

The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing launched on Sunday the Golden Fall International Art Festival throughout September and October that includes several exhibitions and seminars involving artists and scholars from home and abroad.

A highlight event is a new media art biennial discussing the future relationship between the human beings and technology. Two shows will be held at CAFA's art museum and the World Art Museum at Beijing's Millennium Monument, as part of the annual Beijing Design Week.

Fei Jun, the biennial's curator, says the international artists integrate art and technologies, and they invite the audience to reflect on the emerging issues between people and machines and science.

Another exhibition starting from Sept 30 will revolve around the career of Japanese photographer Hiroji Kubota over a span of 50 years. Titled The Story of Looking, it will provide a unique perspective for the audience, through Kubota's lens, to review the world's transformations and major events since the 1960s.

The exhibition will also retrace the 77-year-old's connection with China. Kubota made several trips in the country between 1978 and 1985, taking some 200,000 pictures. He held two exhibitions at the National Art Museum of China, first in 1981 and another in 1985, which cast long-lasting influence on young photographers of the time.

The first congress of International Academic Printmaking Alliance will be held on Sept 25. The two-day conference will be attended by artists and university professors from across the world, and coupled with an exhibition to be held at the Taimiao or Beijing Working People's Cultural Palace.

The activities will address to not only academic topics but also how to make lithography more attractive to the audience when artistic creations today tend to be multiple oriented and mixed with various mediums.

Two forums will talk about the design of symbols of the Winter Olympic Games to be held in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, Hebei province, in 2022, and how art can play a bigger and constructive role in city planning, as Beijing is speeding up its construction of a new administrative subcenter in its Tongzhou district in the eastern suburb.

Fan Di'an, the headmaster of CAFA, says the initiate of the festival will deepen the school's collaboration with the universities, museums and cultural institutions abroad, bringing students and teachers to the front line of international art circles.

He says being a privileged art college, they not only stress academic developments but also, they hope to transform these achievements into real-life products that will benefit the general public.

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