Featured Art Space: Lijiang Studio

Get a sense of the thriving art scene in Lijiang, Yunnan Province (like Dali, Lijiang is a home-away-from-home for China’s elite artists, from film-makers and painters to sculptors and writers).

Lijiang Studio provides living space, working space, and facilitation
for international, Chinese, and local artists in two locations: one
rural location, Lashihai, and one urban location, Kunming, both in
Yunnan Province, China.

Lijiang Studio’s base is at Lashihai, a
rural farming community 20 kilometers from the city of Lijiang, a
UNESCO World Heritage site. The main residency facility is a
traditional Naxi courtyard house, lightly renovated. Lashihai is a
lake, situated at the base of 5596 meter Jade Dragon Snow Mountain,
inside a nature reserve.

The Lijiang Studio aims are:

1) To benefit local people
with cultural intervention that is sensitive to their communities and
traditions, providing a means for them to adapt to the massive influx
of Western, global culture and forces of modernization in ways that
enhance, rather than deplete, their culture.

2) To complement
and foster growth in China’s thriving arts communities, which presently
exist in the outskirts of cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and
Guangzhou. To connect Chinese artists with a community rooted in
China’s rural culture, as an alternative to the urban Chinese
experience.

3) To provide international artists with the
opportunity to experience rural Chinese village life, as an alternative
to the intense pressure and marginalized status of the international
“white box” art circuit.