Smile Shanghai

Hello there! Remember us!? You may remember me as Aaron from Rebecca and Aaron's blog. We've been way behind and we're going to try to start catching up and even retroactively blogging a bit. We have so many BTD (blogs-to-do) that we've have developed quite a BLOB (back log of blogs). Look for more F'n (frequent) posts soon. Here's one now...

A few months ago, my sister forwarded me a website by Bren Bataclan and his Smile project. Bren is an artist from Boston who paints very interesting cartoon characters and distributes some for free around town with a note attached that says, "This painting is yours if you smile at random people more often." On his website, he has pictures of his work from various locations (Smile New York, Smile Chicago, etc...) as well as some fantastic emails he's received from some of the random recipients of his work. I was both fascinated and inspired by this idea and contacted Bren to talk about doing Smile Shanghai. Bren was excited about the idea and shipped some paintings to Cleveland to Rebecca's parents who brought them to Shanghai during their visit in November. Bren only asked that I take some photos of the distribution. My Mandarin teacher helped me translate the English and, voila, below you can find photos of the distribution. I knew I would enjoy taking the photos, but I wasn't prepared for how exhilarating it was to leave free art around town, especially in China, where one can not take art for granted.


More to come soon including: visits from Mom's and Dad's, Amazing and random encounters with Blake and James, How to make a custom wood crafts in Shanghai, Mr. Gu gets email and a puppy, and many more. Order now.