Recently, our Grade 11 DP Visual Arts students took an important local trip in Nanjing that brought their art lessons to life. Students visited four diverse exhibitions at two different locations. At Nanjing Art Museum, they experienced the Urban Echo exhibition, featuring fine arts graduate students' works from Nanjing, Changchun, and Nantong. While at Deji Art Museum, they explored Beeple's Tales from a Synthetic Future (groundbreaking digital art by Mike Winkelmann), An Era in Jinling (an immersive digital experience of ancient Nanjing), and World of Flowers (140 floral-themed artworks by master artists from different art movements and cultures, such as Claude Monet, Georgia O'Keeffe, Anselm Kiefer, and Wu Dayu). These exhibitions showed students the incredible variety of art-making forms and creative strategies that artists use to communicate their ideas – from traditional painting to cutting-edge digital technology.

This trip directly supports the new DP Visual Arts guide's emphasis on helping students connect, investigate, and situate – three key objectives of the course. When students visit real exhibitions, they learn to understand how artworks exist in different contexts, discover their cultural significance, and see how artists communicate with real audiences. After the museum visits, students participated in a creative workshop where they responded to what they saw, generating their own artistic ideas and plans that connect to the exhibitions. This work will be refined, synthesised, and resolved into finished artworks next semester, showing how field trip experiences directly feed into students' own creative practice.

The trip helped NIS students engage authentically with art, transform their understanding through real experiences, and begin to emerge as informed young artists who situate themselves within both local and global art communities – exactly what the new DP Visual Arts course aims to achieve.