Collegiate student wins national Scholastic Art Award, scholarship for photographs

Shi Yan’s senior year as a foreign-exchange student has definitely been eventful.

He only lasted a couple of weeks as a lineman on Wichita Collegiate’s football team – “It’s really a brand-new sport for me,” he says – before broken ribs during practice ended his season.

And, like every student in Kansas, he saw his senior year cut short because of the coronavirus pandemic, changing to online classes.

“I do feel heartbroken because I cannot see my friends,” he said. “It is quite comfortable studying at home rather than going to school.”

But Shi Yan, who gave himself the nickname of “Scott” at Collegiate, has an honor shared with 15 other students nationwide. His photography portfolio, “Beautiful China,” made him a winner in the 97th annual Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the nation’s longest-running recognition program for creative students in seventh through 12th grades.

The awards include a $10,000 scholarship.

“It really means a lot to me,” he said. “It’s like a feedback on all the time and effort I have spent on photography.”

The photos in his portfolio — four black-and-white, four color — came from a road trip with his parents to the FuJian province in the easternmost part of China last summer.

“There’s some old farmers there, and they are keeping their Chinese culture, the agricultural culture, from a long time ago,” said Yan, the only child of a father who manages a shopping center and mother who works for Apple. “It’s a beautiful place to take pictures. I just wanted to use my camera to record the moment.”

He estimated he took thousands of photos and spent the time that he would have had in football practice narrowing down his choices for the contest.

“I did have a feeling maybe some of them were pretty good,” he said. “It’s really hard for me to choose.”

The photos impressed his host mother, Julia Romain.

“I thought, wow, that’s certainly something I can’t do,” said Romain, a retired special education teacher at Wichita East and Chinese native who has hosted foreign exchange students from China for several years. “He has quite a good eye and gets good angles. It’s quite impressive.”

The photos also impressed the judges, according to Anthea Song, manager of programs and communications for the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, who was a moderator during the art adjudication.

“They were definitely impressed by the level of sophistication and professionalism that are clearly exemplified in the photographs,” Song said. “They were mindful of the skill and the details as well.”

Yan is from Guangzhou, the fourth-largest city in China with a population of 13 million.

When looking for a city for the exchange program, his parents “wanted me to choose not such a big city. We decided maybe Wichita is a better place for me,” he said.

Yan has been accepted to the Art Institute of Chicago this fall as a film and new media major.

“(My parents) were a little surprised, but they understand because they see what I have done with photography and art,” he said. “They have seen some of my talent.”

It is, however, only the third year that Yan has been taking photographs.

The Nikon D810 camera that he uses belongs to his mother.

“She thought I should start with a camera for the beginner,” he said. “Now she’s thinking I should have a better camera.”