SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruiz-Healy Art announced that Peruvian-American artist Cecilia Paredes won the international award for artistic excellence at the 2014 Pingyao International Festival of Photography in Shanxi, China. The Jin Hou Niao Zun trophy was presented at a glittering televised event staged on Sunday 21 September in the recently opened Pingyao Memories Theatre.

The PIP Awards were established in 2010 to mark the annual festival’s first decade and have rapidly grown in stature in the intervening years. PIP is China’s largest and longest running festival of photography. It is staged annually within the ancient walled city of Pingyao, a designated UNESCO world heritage site. In 2014 PIP presented the work of 2,100 artists and photographers from 32 countries worldwide.

Entitled Background Stories, Ms Paredes’ winning exhibition was organized by the Australian curator Alasdair Foster and comprised 22 large format pieces selected from her internationally acclaimed Landscape series.

In October Ms Paredes’ winning exhibition will tour on to Beijing Photo; one of only four PIP exhibitions selected for showing in the nation’s capital. The exhibition opens in Beijing on 12 October and runs for one month. Combining performance and photography, Cecilia Paredes’ ‘landscapes’ draw on the metaphor of pattern and camouflage to evoke the dilemma of the migrant who must adopt the patterns of a new environment while remaining culturally connected to her or his homeland. While the figure in the images seems to blend into the background, in each case the woman herself is whole and unchanged. Form holds the truth; pattern the context.

Cecilia Paredes was born in Peru and currently lives between Philadelphia (USA) and Lima. She has exhibited widely in North, South and Central America, Europe, Asia and Australia, with more than 25 solo exhibitions in Palace in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Costa Rica Museum of Art; World Bank, DC, USA; Getxophoto, Spain; Foto Bogotá Festival, Colombia; and the Osma Museum, Lima.

Curator Alasdair Foster has 20 years’ experience heading national arts institutions in Europe and Australia and over 35 years of working in the public cultural sector. He was the founding director of Fotofeis, the award-winning international biennale of photo-based art in Scotland (1991-1997) and, more recently, director of the Australian Centre for Photography (1998-2011). He founded Cultural Development Consulting (CDC) in 2011 with a special focus on developing intercultural’ conversations’ in the Asia-Pacific region. He lives in Sydney, Australia, and works worldwide.

Founded in 2004, and located in the historic Olmos Park District of San Antonio, Texas, Ruiz-Healy Art specializes in contemporary and modern art with an emphasis on Latin American artists and artists living in or with a connection to Texas.