public welfare art exhibition titled “Meeting Beauty” with works showing the local conditions and customs of Xishuangbanna in Yunnan Province opened at the Songjiang Art Museum on Monday and will run until March 22, aiming to highlight Songjiang's efforts to help the autonomous prefecture in southwestern China.

Xishuangbanna is the hometown of China's famous Asian elephants and peacocks so sculptures and decorative patterns based on images of these animals can be seen everywhere in the exhibition.

The Publicity Department of the Songjiang Committee, the Grassroots Development Department of the Women’s Federation in the district and the Songjiang Representative Office of the Shanghai Children’s Fund jointly organized the event and called on citizens to send in works, such as Chinese paintings, oil paintings, prints and murals, for consideration. Nearly 40 artists were also invited to create thematic works for the exhibition.

The organizers received more than 10,000 works from Shanghai, Yunnan and other places, from which they selected 360 high-quality painting and calligraphy works matching the theme.

Some of the works will be publicly auctioned on the closing day of the exhibition and all can be purchased by the general public. A special group of ten paintings will be sold at a reserve price of 15,000 yuan (about $2300). All the money raised will be donated to the Songjiang Representative Office of Shanghai Children's Fund to help needy children and to the city’s partnership aid programs. Purchasers will receive a special certificate issued by the foundation.

The exhibition is a follow-up to a photography competition on the same theme held in Songjiang last year, featuring photos taken in Xishuangbanna showing the beautiful natural scenery and colorful local customs, and reflecting the achievements of Shanghai-Yunnan cooperation in poverty alleviation.

Located in a tropical region in China and with a forest comprising 80 percent of the land area, Xishuangbanna Dai autonomous prefecture of Yunnan Province has the only tropical rainforest nature reserve in the country. It is rich in natural resources but lacks sales channels to connect to the market.

Since the end of 2016, Songjiang and Xishuangbanna have carried out targeted poverty alleviation. Governments at all levels in the targeted districts and all sectors of society in the two areas have connected in the fields of industry, market, science and technology, culture, education and health.

Songjiang has now assisted Xishuangbanna in the implementation of 105 projects, covering areas such as vocational education and training, infrastructure construction in poor villages, and industrial development, with an investment of over 110 million yuan.

Xishuangbanna has become the first prefecture in Yunnan to achieve the goal of “lifting the whole prefecture out of poverty” thanks to the partnership aid policy.