International Journal of Education & the Arts

This article features a creative fabrication project assigned to participants in a short-term education abroad program at a Midwestern state university in the US. The Get-in-Touch assignment merged intercultural research and studio work to enrich and transform participants’ travel experience in China. Several aesthetic stances (mimetic, formalistic, and contextualist) were adopted to interpret the three-dimensional projects documented with photocollages and stories in this manuscript. Travel–study provided a dynamic platform that allowed the four participants to manifest intercultural learning outcomes: making the dissimilar similar, making the unfamiliar familiar, making the familiar unfamiliar and making the similar dissimilar. This article further illuminates the aesthetic stances noted above through the work of four contemporary Chinese artists and offers an indirect glimpse into the art school curricula found in higher education in both cultures. The discussion highlights learned lessons of cultural humility.