“The Start of a Long Journey -- 2013 CAFA Excellent Graduation Works Exhibition” is the fifth exhibition launched by the Program. As a courageous experiment in breaking through traditional exhibition pattern adopted by fine art colleges, the exhibition has been successfully extended to the whole country and become an important brand of CAFA’s academic exhibition after five years of development.

As an important event for this year, the Exhibition, after careful academic evaluation and selection, will present excellent graduation works by 155 undergraduates and graduates from School of Chinese Painting, School of Fine Art, School of Design, School of Architecture, School of City Design and School of Humanities. With the amazing creativity and spirit of exploration, today they are the graduate students from CAFA and tomorrow they will be the hope of Chinese art field. Through their works, we can clearly find out CAFA’s current teaching level and periodic achievements.

“The Start of a Long Journey” keeps thriving and developing, with which CAFA’s increasingly opened educational attitude, high-level and internationalized academic horizon were fully demonstrated. Through such an exhibition program directing to the social public, we aim at inheriting CAFA’s profound and excellent academic tradition, integrating it into current teaching, research and creation practice, and setting up an open and equal platform for communication and study, in order to enable the whole society with a clear, direct and all-round picture of current higher art education in China. In 2013, CAFA is going to celebrate the 95th anniversary. Undoubtedly, the exhibition will be the best gift for her. All the excellent works displayed on the exhibition, together with all the students’ and teachers’ great efforts and creativity behind the works are their most sincere celebration to the Alta Mater.

“The Start of a Long Journey”, as an exhibition, always emphasizes the academic and professional feature. Through demonstrating our teaching results in a professional modern art museum and publishing quality catalogue, we are providing more opportunities for all the talented participants. With the relentless efforts in the past five years, “The Start of a Long Journey” was not only an important brand exhibition of CAFA, but also widely accepted and positively responded in the whole country. “The Start of a Long Journey — The Exhibition of Outstanding Works by Graduates from Key Art Institutions of Higher Education in China” was initiated since 2010, and so far has been successfully held in the past three years. The fourth exhibition will be held in this November in Chinese Academy of Art. It further enhanced communication and cooperation in talent education and cultivation for Chinese higher art education field. 

Furthermore, “The Start of a Long Journey” exhibition has already went abroad, as “The Start a Long Journey – The Collection of Excellent Graduation Works (2009-2011) from China Central Academy of Fine Arts” was successfully held in London, UK at the beginning of 2012, which was positively commented by our international counterparts. In a sense, it has created an access to the whole world for excellent Chinese art talents, opened a wider space for their artistic development, and demonstrated CAFA’s fine tradition of always focusing on students, valuing talents and supporting their development.

In 2009 when the first exhibition was held, I once said, “The exhibition is only an opening. We will show our teaching activities to the society more with an opener attitude, and serve the society more with the achievements of those activities.” Looking back into the development in the past five years, we have far realized the initial goal and have reached an unexpected high place.

Therefore, I sincerely hope that “The Start of a Long Journey” exhibition, as a new brand established by CAFA in the new century, will keep optimizing, upgrading and developing. For this reason, we are looking forward to criticisms and comments from the whole society and the great public through the exhibition.

Pan Gongkai

President of China Central Academy of Fine Arts