Chinese Folk Art and Food

LION arranged an exhibition of Chinese folk art for us, and provided what they call snacks, and most of us would call a meal. First the art, then the food.

These are carved and painted gourds, the large blue one was selling for 5000 RMB, or about $750. Very pretty!

This is the artist that painted the gourds.

Another artist was doing calligraphy, this is a traditional Chinese good luck totem.

The same artist also did the next piece, which is bamboo growing upward. There is a lot to the story of this piece, and I did not get it all.

The artist personalized it for us with our names. The artist is the woman on the left in the next picture.

The others in the picture, from left to right, are the woman that made the silhouettes (soon), Vicky, our resident manager at the hotel, the man that made the blown sugar animals, and the woman that painted the gourds again.

These are the silhouettes she made for us

Can you tell which is me and which is Pam?

This is a really cool dragon also done by the woman that made the silhouettes

The same person made the crafts in the next picture

These are the blown sugar animals, Pam has an ox and I have a rat – representing the year we were born.

Here is the artist taking a break.

There was also live entertainment

From Wikipedia,

Bian Lian (simplified Chinese: 变脸; traditional Chinese: 變臉; pinyin: Biàn Liǎn; literally: ‘Face-Changing’) is an ancient Chinese dramatic art that is part of the more general Sichuan opera. Performers wear brightly colored costumes and move to quick, dramatic music. They also wear vividly colored masks, typically depicting well known characters from the opera, which they change from one face to another almost instantaneously with the swipe of a fan, a movement of the head, or wave of the hand.

Here is a video of part of the performance we saw

We also had a short example of opera, performed by the woman in the next picture. You can see the video here: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0z2FSGkRgu_wZfIKK9iw8ceZg#Dalian,_Liaoning

Now for the food, the following pictures are the snacks they set out for us:

I forgot to take pictures of the desserts, i tried the cheesecake- like dessert and the tiramisu, both were excellent.

Overall it was a very entertaining, enlightening, and pleasant evening with our colleagues from LION Education and the hotel staff. The personal involvement and attention of the hotel staff in China is amazing compared to the impersonal experience in the US.

Here is a picture of the whole group