On assignment for
Amnesty International, out former NBA player John
Amaechi and out photographer Jeff Sheng report from the 2008
Olympics in Beijing.
When former NBA
star John Amaechi, who was raised in
England, accepted assignments from Amnesty
International (where he serves as a spokesperson) and
the BBC (where he provides basketball commentary) to
cover the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, he knew exactly
who he wanted as a travelling companion. His friend Jeff
Sheng is ethnically Chinese, fluent in the language,
and has spent more than a year living and
traveling mainland China as a foreign exchange student
and frequent visitor. Sheng is also something of
a wunderkind. At 27 his arresting photographs have
appeared in more than 20 exhibits across the country,
including at Yale University and as part of
"LA25," a select group of diverse artists showing
October 8 to November 16 at Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions in Hollywood. And he's a visiting
professor at the University of California, Santa
Barbara.
What resulted was
a series of photographs, which we've excerpted here, as
well as daily musings on life in China, the Olympic
Games, and anything else that comes to mind. For a
full account go to beijinglegacyblog.com.
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