A Brief Introduction to the Department of Visual Arts

　　The Department of Visual Arts employs 37 staff; including 1 professor, 6 associate professors and 27 lecturers, of whom one has a D.F.A and 6 have M.F.As. Our staff has won many honors on a national and an international level: some of them are state or world renowned modern artists; some have been awarded the honor as the Outstanding Teachers in China and the Outstanding Teachers in Guangdong Province. Some are the candidates for the New Century National Backbone Principal and Teacher Training Project in Guangdong Province; some are members of the Compiling Team for National Visual Arts Textbook and other state-level organizations. The teachers’ works have been shown in over 10 countries and have won numerous prizes. Some of their works are in public collections including: the Great Hall of the People, the Museum of Switzerland, and the Guangdong Art Gallery. Through the efforts of these staff members, the Department of Visual Arts has witnessed robust development in teaching and academic research.

　　The Department offers four diploma-granting programs including: Visual Arts Education (two-year program and five-year program), Computer-Aided Design, Advertisement Design, and Artistic Design. With an enlarged enrollment scale, we enroll new students from several provinces, including: Guangdong Province, Hunan Province, Hubei Province, Hainan Province, and Shandong Province. Now there are more than six hundred students in total enrolled.

　　We adhere to our basic teaching concept, that is, “to upgrade students’ abilities, to cultivate the students into talented individuals with innovative and experimental skills.” We take social needs as our guiding principle, emphasizing the comprehensiveness of the four programs, the integration of our curricula, and the interaction of the teaching methods and their varieties. Based on these ideas, we build up a pattern of cultivating all-round students.

　　In recent years, we have established academic communication with many countries and regions, including Germany, France, Britain, the United States, Italy, Holland, Australia, Mexico, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Macao. What’s more, we invite experts and specialists from home and abroad to give lectures. We have a close tie with institutions of visual arts and organize students to take part in art exhibitions at home and abroad. In order to better coordinate practical techniques with the theoretical content of our taught courses, we have built up studios such as Photographic Studio, New Media Studio, Clay Modeling Studio, and Sculpture Studio.

　　Since 2005, we have jointly run an undergraduate self-taught enrollment project with South China Normal University. This has greatly helped the students to further their education. For the past two decades, our graduates have worked in different areas in Guangdong. They have become the backbones in the fields of visual arts education and design. Most of them have become outstanding teachers, leaders in their academic field, or famous designers. They are spoken highly of by the educational administration and work units.