About this Page

Here I document the honors and recognitions that the Art & Beyond Club has received along our journey. Receiving these accolades has been extremely motivating, but our goals extend far beyond that. As a result, I've included a summary for each award. By writing these reflections, I am able to consider the club's achievements, areas for improvement, and future goals.

School's Highest Honor: "the Most Influential Club" in the 1st Semester of 2025-2026 School Year

The Art & Beyond Club has quickly reached its half-year anniversary. Over the past six months:

The club organized several academic lectures.
We participated in the school charity sale and hosted an experiential activity featuring "Plant Hammering Dyeing," a traditional intangible cultural heritage craft.
We planned and held a themed art event called "Collision and Fusion": Through sharing sessions, workshops, and other formats, we guided members both within and outside the club to recreate classic artworks using their favorite or most skilled methods. The completed works were exhibited on campus, and during the exhibition, we also held an art history quiz with prizes. Additionally, we will be setting up a dedicated booth for our club at the Asian New Year event in Montélimar, France, showcasing some of our "Collision and Fusion" works. Excitingly, this cultural exchange charity event has also attracted students from outside our school to join, making our collection of works even richer.
We held a relay activity for designing our club's exclusive mascot, where everyone took turns illustrating it.
Every month, we collect and update information on local art exhibitions in Shanghai and share our visiting experiences.

We have also been thinking about how to attract more students interested in art and aesthetics. We've decided to continue lowering the barriers of expertise and technical skill required for our various activities while maintaining high artistic standards. Our goal is to bring art into the lives of more students beyond those studying fine arts. Stay tuned for what's coming next!

On another note, as the club president, this is my first time founding and leading a student art club. I've been learning and exploring along the way—stumbling at times, but growing throughout.

As a brand-new club, we are incredibly proud to have received the school's highest honor of "the Most Influential Club" in our very first semester!

Special thanks to our vice president, Scarlett, who made a club summary video that helped us gain more votes. Thanks also to our faculty advisors for their recognition and support.

We will only get better from here!

Cathy Shen

Jan 16th, 2026

Letter of Appreciation from Montélimar, France

For organizing students from multiple schools in Shanghai and Nanjing to participate in the "Montélimar, France 2026 Asian New Year Cultural Exchange Event," ‘Art & Beyond' and the club president received letters of appreciation written by the Montélimar Sino-French Exchange Association and co-signed by the City Hall and the Consulate General. For details on our exhibition participation, please refer to 'Club Booth at Montélimar 2026 (Year of Asia) Festival.'

School's Highest Honor: "the Most Influential Club" in the 2nd Semester of 2025-2026 School Year

Before I knew it, the second semester of ninth grade had come to a close, and Art & Beyond had reached its first anniversary.

This semester, we created a “Traveling Sketchbook,” a shared space where words left unsaid and emotions worth remembering could be expressed through drawings and writing. Passed from hand to hand among students both within and beyond our club, it became something truly open and alive: anyone could write in it, anyone could draw, and anyone could respond, reflect, and connect.

We also came together to create a collaborative digital painting, and through that process, we grew closer to one another. Invited by the Math and Modeling Club, we held a joint campus exhibition, The Beauty of Mathematics in Art, exploring the connection between logic and creativity. We even designed a puzzle game that helped others discover the charm of classical paintings through play.

As we collected information on local art exhibitions in Shanghai, we encountered hundreds of breathtaking official exhibition posters, each distinctive in style and rich in visual imagination. Inspired by them, we launched an online vote so that students could choose the posters they admired most for display. We studied and summarized professional standards and guidelines for poster design, developed a mini-program to assist with color matching, and brought these efforts together with original works by our club members to create Within a Square Inch, an exhibition dedicated to the aesthetics of poster art.

The exhibition was warmly received, earning widespread praise and even being featured on our school’s official public platform.

All of this has filled me with joy and a deep sense of fulfillment. But more than that, the more we have done, the more clearly we have realized how much more there is still to do.

No matter what form it takes in the future, my journey to make art and aesthetic appreciation more accessible will never stop.

Cathy Shen

June 17th, 2026