Touching the Mekong: A Southeast Asian Sojourn

The Institutional Art Program – in cooperation with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology – is proud to present

 

 

Touching the Mekong:

A Southeast Asian Sojourn

 

 

52 visual poems by photographer Andrea M. Baldeck, M.D.

 

 

This exhibit runs from February 1 through March 15, 2006 in Pre-fuction area of Preston Auditorium (World Bank Main Complex)

 

Touching the Mekong offers a lyric depiction of contemporary life in mainland Southeast Asia-Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos seen through the eyes of an extraordinary human being: musician, photographer, kitchen-alchemist, and physician Andrea Baldeck.

 

Born in a rural village in western New York, Andrea Baldeck began photographing with a simple box camera at the age of eight, imagining herself a LIFE photographer canoeing through the jungle to meet Albert Schweitzer.  This interest and dream pervaded years of musical study at Vassar, medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and practice as an internist and anesthesiologist.  On medical trips to Haiti and Grenada, camera and stethoscope occupied the same bag.

 

In the early 1990’s she left the operating room for the darkroom, to work as a fine-art photographer in black and white.  During the following decade, her portfolio grew to accommodate portraiture, still life, and landscapes, as featured in her books The Heart of Haiti (1996), Talismanic (1998), Venice a Personal View (1999), and Touching the Mekong (2003).  Since 1996 she has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, and her images are found in museums and private collections.

In Touching the Mekong Baldeck has chosen to focus on the enduring influence of ancient philosophies and religions -Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism - on societies in transition, where currents of tradition and change are constantly reshaping the cultures of the Mekong River basin.  The sensuality of her landscapes, the intense attention to the detail, and her fascination for the people and their world transpire from these gorgeous black and white photos on view from February 1 through March 15, 2006 in the pre-function area of the Preston auditorium in the Main Complex of the World Bank.