Crowded enrollment, uneven teaching, and even censorship of projects are making some art students in China question the value of their degrees
When printmaking student Lu Xiaoyang began preparing his graduation project in August last year, he planned to exhibit a piece about marginalized youth, but then his university stepped in.
First, Lu’s supervisor at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, Liaoning province, rejected a series of his prints because of nudity in their content, and because their title, “Manchurian Gothic,” was deemed politically sensitive. Lu then submitted a new piece, “Young Kids in the Shell,” about teenagers who fall into drinking and taking drugs.
But when he viewed his university’s graduation exhibition online, Lu found his piece had inexplicably been renamed “Degeneration No. 2.” The exhibition was “meaningless to me,” Lu, who wanted to be known by a pseudonym, tells TWOC, “I was numb by the end.”
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