13 October 2017
On the afternoon of 11 October 2017, as the invited works of the 19 Shanghai International Art Festival, the opening ceremony of "He Yan Painting Exhibition: Taste", was held on the ground floor of the Shanghai Theatre Academy Library at the Huashan Road campus. The exhibition displays the selected paintings of Mr He Yan, who is dean of Shanghai Theatre Academy’s Acting Department, as well as a theatre director and acting teacher, from his nearly ten years of crossover artistic practice.
The main guests of the opening ceremony were Party Secretary Lou Wei, President Huang Changyong and other key members of the leadership of the Shanghai Theatre Academy and the heads of various colleges, departments and functional offices, as well as famous stage designer Hu Miaosheng, famous painter Pei Jing, famous painter Qu Fengguo, famous stage designer Shen Li, famous lighting designer Shen Yu, Renowned painter Jiang Minghui, leading makeup designer Jiang Lingjun, famous director Lei Guohua, renowned scholar Wu Zetao and so on. Also attending the opening ceremony were Shanghai Theatre Academy’s foreign expert on Meisner method Scott Tillma Trost, as well as a team of promising young teachers and all students of the Year 2015 and Year 2017 classes of the Acting Department of the Shanghai Theatre Academy.
During the opening ceremony, Professor Huang Changyong, President of Shanghai Theatre Academy, gave a high opinion of the paintings, and commended that He Yan's paintings went out "an unusual way of art", which was a typical artistic representative of the good cultural tradition and artistic ecology on the campus of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Prof Hu Miaosheng, Executive Director and Head of Theory Department of China Institute of Stage Design, praised He Yan for his “extraordinary diligence” in the pursuit of art, as well as his mastery of performing arts and fine arts and his great accomplishments in both, which reflects that “all forms of art are connected”, a state that all art practitioners should strive to pursue.
Professor Pei Jing, Director of Shanghai Theatre Academy’s teaching and research office for painting and a famous painter, spoke highly about He Yan’s paintings from a professional perspective, praising that the patience and sincerity reflected in He Yan’s paintings are the character that the members of the Shanghai Theatre Academy are proud of and are the most precious quality that artists should possess.
The exhibition was highly praised by people from all walks of life. As an expert educator of performing acts and also an administrator of performing acts education, it is in this free and inclusive cultural environment of the Shanghai Theatre Academy that Mr He Yan has created all these idealistic and surrealistic paintings with his long years of educational practice and artistic reflections.
From an operator of performing arts education to an administrator of performing arts education, from practice to theory, from performing arts to fine arts, Mr He Yan has been painting for nearly ten years with nearly one thousand paintings. This exhibition "Taste” will last for 18 days, display a selected collection of 296 paintings. You are cordially welcome to visit "He Yan Painting Exhibition: Taste".
The exhibition coincides with the alma mater visit of Mr He Yan’ students, i.e. all students of the Year 1993 class of the Shanghai Theatre Academy's Acting Department. By then, these alumni, including Liaofan, Li Bingbing, Liu Xiaofeng, Fan Zhibo, Ren Quan, Xiao Ying, Hai Yitian, Li Xuetao, Huang Hao, Wang Yanan, Liu Xiaohu, Xu Lu, Lu Jing, Peng Bo, Sun Qing, Gao Beibei, Cao Yanyan, Zhang Tong, Zhang Fenghua and Suhua, will come to the exhibition.
