In this moment, we have hundreds of friends around the world together in this virtual meeting room, held by Guozhong Ceramic Art Museum, our friends are everywhere on this planet, not only from different time zones, but also from different seasons, such as the snow covered winter of Scandinavia, Russia, and the part of North America, as well as from the hot summer of South Africa, Australia and Argentina. 
Today, at this challenging time when the global pandemic has still not subsided, it is not easy to host such an event.

The IAC New Members Exhibition opening was originally planned in last March and was going to be exhibited at IAC Congress in Finland last July. There should be more than 120 artworks all together. Due to the impact of COVID-19, many flights were cancelled, and a lot of packages were stuck for over three months. I received many emails almost every day from our members to confirm the arrivals of their artworks. I feel so sorry that I wasn’t able to answer all these emails in time. We had to stop the rest of the package shipments to avoide further problems. The exhibition has also been postponed many times. As a person in charge of this exhibition, I deeply regret what happened!

However, after several months of hard work, Mr. Zheng Zhi, the top leader of Guozhong Ceramic Art Museum, and his team have decided to use the online and on-site global synchronous opening ceremony and the seminar to make up for this defect to a certain extent.

The pandemic has had a certain negative impact on almost everyone, many schools have been closed, exhibitions and activities have been cancelled. On the other hand, we have seen many artists use this period of time to constantly learn, enrich themselves and create a large number of excellent artworks. I believe that all of us will encourage each other and overcome the difficulties with an optimistic attitude.

Finally, I would like say congratulations to Mr. Wan Liya, who was elected as the new IAC Council member - representative of China, and thanks to all the staff members at Guozhong for their hard work, and thanks to all of you from IAC who supported and participated in the exhibition and seminar online or on-site! Please stay safe, and be healthy. We are looking forward to meeting everyone again after the pandemic is over, smiling without masks and embracing without hesitation.