Written by Elisabeth Bishop
Photos by Albert Jung
University of Oregon graduate student Lyle Murphy has never studied abroad before. But Murphy, who studies sculpture and folklore, may have found a perfect match in the newly created ChinaVine summer field school hosted in Beijing, China.
“It involves two things I’m going to school for – art and folklore,” says Murphy, who plans to apply for next summer’s field school. He’s especially interested in studying the usage and meaning of color in Chinese artwork.
Students in the field school will spend two weeks documenting folk art and interviewing local artists in two cultural districts near Beijing. Their work will contribute to ChinaVine, a collaborative project between American and Chinese universities to document and preserve traditional Chinese art. Student photographs, video, and audio recordings will be archived on the interactive website alongside the work of Chinese and American scholars.
University professors John Fenn and Doug Blandy spent five years documenting Chinese folk artists and creating the ChinaVine website. They developed the field school as a UO study abroad program and will lead the activities in Beijing.
“We have two sites in Beijing,” Fenn says. “We’re interested in comparison between them, looking at art and culture and heritage across those two areas.”
The first site, Gaobeidian, is a government-designated folklore village – like the Williamsburg, Pennsylvania of southeast Beijing – an area famous for its woodcraft and furniture. The other site is a group of villages in a rural
area south of Beijing called Song Zhuang, home to up to 5,000 artists of every discipline.
The program runs from July 5 to 19, 2011, with two weeks of online coursework and discussion before and after the trip. The online orientation will begin in late June, followed by two weeks of fieldwork in Beijing and two weeks for independent travel around Southeast Asia. At the end of the program, students will spend two weeks working online to organize their materials and prepare them to go on ChinaVine.org.
“This is a very collaborative project,” Blandy says. “We’re hoping that students help us imagine how to present and interpret this material … in this [Internet] environment that they are heavily immersed in.”
The field school is open to undergraduate and graduate students in any major. Foreign language skills and previous fieldwork experience are not required.
“We would love to see students who are energetic and ready to be in this immersive environment doing fieldwork,” Fenn said. “We want students to be active participants.”
Students in the ChinaVine field school will receive eight upper-division arts and administration credits and some unique opportunities for cultural immersion. Students will spend all day with the Chinese artists whose work they document, even eating meals and walking around the neighborhood with them. They will work alongside Chinese scholars from three nearby universities, including graduate students in folklore at Beijing Normal University who will help with translation.
“With a traditional study abroad program, you might just sit in a lecture hall. Even though you’re going to another place, I don’t know how immersed you are in the culture,” Murphy says. “[ChinaVine] interested me because it concentrates on working with artists in China.”

Gallery • 2 Photos

Albert Jung

New Study Abroad Program Sends Students Afield