首師大美院

Today I met with a first year art student named 袁若南 (YuanRuonan) who showed me around the CNU art department and campus. Luckily I remembered to bring my camera. Their first year art students must have had a lot of training pre-college, though I forgot to ask her what that might have included. The skill in drawings was consistently good. Many of the classrooms were for 國畫 (Guo Hua) or "national painting." They included very linear and intricate images of people, some of whom were in some pretty fancy garb (see photos). Many of the studios were quite cramped, but still very nice. Definitely some fire hazards in the oil painting studios (which smelled so nice). The amount of face drawings was a lot of fun, because they're everywhere and lurking in corners and staring off in every direction. Also, there were a couple of hallways in which large classical statues were stored. They added excitement to empty corners. One was an enormous head, I didn't think to photograph that at the time. I felt uncomfortable taking photos of people's artwork, but that didn't seem to be an issue. I avoided taking pictures in any of the studios that had a lot of people working in them anyway though.

There are a couple of other pictures from the rest of the campus (this is the main campus, I live two blocks down on a smaller campus). Two are of the swimming pool and one is the track, which I will likely be using now that I know it exists. It's a pretty neat campus, a lot is crammed into a small space and there are nice trees. YuanRuonan was surprised to learn that I only have one roommate (she has seven). Can't lie, my dorm (hotel) is posh. A woman changes our sheets and cleans the room regularly. The Chinese student dorms would definitely be a better place to learn Chinese.