SHUIJIANG SCHOOL
Hunan Province, China 2024
BEFORE: The exterior surface of the water tower
prepped and ready for painting!
Above: Lily and Dandelion Principal Zheng Hong
at the Welcome Ceremony at Shuijiang.
Above: students in the school yard at Shuijiang
during the Welcome Ceremony.
The project began with a series of presentations, class by class, to the entire student body. Accompanied by a slide show of images illustrating her artistic influences, her work at the Village of Arts and Humanities and her international projects, Lily provided inspiration for the art classes that followed. Led by art teachers from Dandelion under Lily’s direction the classes provided an opportunity for the students to tap into their creativity and provided source materials from which Lily drew inspiration.
Shuijiang Tree of Life Mural
AFTER: The completed Shuijiang Tree of Life mural.
shuijiang School background
Shuijiang Middle School, founded in 1968, is a public rural junior middle school located in a poor mountainous area of Xinhua County, Loudi City, Hunan Province. 70% of the students are “left-behind.” Their parents have migrated to large cities for work leaving their children behind in the care of grandparents or other family members. Few teachers choose to stay here long term. Shuijiang’s motto is "Be warm. Be like sunshine. Be our home." Under the leadership of Principal Xie Fang Shuijiang is committed to making full use of existing resources within limited conditions, creating the conditions for students to be physically and mentally healthy, grateful, active and optimistic.
BAREFOOT ARTISTS AT SHUIJIANG
The project at Shuijiang was developed in partnership with Dandelion Middle School. Barefoot Artists and Dandelion have a relationship that extends over nearly 2 decades, and Dandelion works with a disadvantaged student population on the other end of urban migration. Many of their students accompanied their migrant parents for work, and they confront a different set of challenges related to relocation from their rural homelands to the Beijing metropolis. Dandelion has a psychology research center led by a graduate of Harvard University. The work of the center is shared widely to benefit other schools, particularly those in rural communities like Shuijiang.
Lily Yeh and Zheng Hong, the Dandelion School principal, were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm and much fanfare when they arrived to Shuijiang. They were ushered from their car into a school assembly with the entire student body, all the teachers and staff. They both addressed the crowd and talked about the role of art in the transformation of the Dandelion campus. Thus the Shuijiang community became excited about the creative process their own campus was about to experience, and the role they would play in creating a visual identity for the school.