This painting’s composition is taken from one of Zhao Gang’s photographs of student life after the cultural revolution in China (set in the 1990). It is a faded photo of a bygone era where the country begun taking it’s steps from suffering biblical locus storms to being one of the largest global economies. In my work I am pursuing a lost portrait of the students that were affected by the sent down movement started enrolling in higher education again, a lost portrait of my mother’s generation and the vulnerability of hope the student had held before the country’s shift into the new millennium. This painting also displays a student band, I thought the silent symphonies they put out to the world was a good metaphor for the hope they held for the future.