On the far side of the world, works by Cornell art faculty members found a new audience in June as part of an exchange between the College of Architecture, Art and Planning and a Chinese university.

A delegation from Cornell attended the opening of the exhibition, "Critical Art: Faculty of the Cornell University Department of Art," June 1 at the School of Art at Hangzhou Normal University in Hangzhou, one hour from Shanghai. The exhibit then traveled to the Academy of Art and Design at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where it was on display June 11-23.

Consisting of works on paper and projected media, the exhibition was accompanied by a bilingual full-color catalog, which showed other works the faculty artists had produced in various media.

The exhibition is part of an evolving partnership between the Cornell Department of Art and Tsinghua University's Academy of Art and Design.

"The two universities have agreed in principle to organize a Cornell/Tsinghua Center for the Study of Contemporary Art," then-department chair Franklin (Buzz) Spector wrote in an introduction to the catalog. "Our idea calls for a center that would sponsor exchanges of faculty artists, conferences about important topics in art, art exhibits with exhibit catalogs and, eventually, student exchanges. The teaching, art making and research pursued in the center will be both critically rigorous and ideologically neutral."

The exhibition and catalog were organized by Xiaowen Chen, visiting associate professor of art at Cornell. Chen said that Cornell will host an exhibition by Tsinghua's art faculty in the 2008-09 academic year.

Chen and Spector were on hand for the opening in Hangzhou and were joined by professor of art Jean Locey in Beijing.

Other faculty participating in the exhibition were Michael Ashkin, Roberto Bertoia, Bradley Borthwick, Diana Cooper, Renate Ferro, Greg Halpern, Ewa Harabasz, Graham McDougal, Todd McGrain, Elisabeth Haly Meyer, Carl Ostendarp, Gregory Page, Maria Park, Barry Perlus, Wilka Roig, Stan Taft and John Zissovici.