SPRINTS x
TEDxHuangpu

Use these awesome visuals.
Act for climate now.

About SPRINTS

Countdown, TED’s initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, and Fine Acts – a global creative studio for social impact, joined forces to kick off a series of SPRINTS creative bootcamps on climate change around the world. The goal: to engage artists to envision what a better climate future looks like. Today, this has grown into an extraordinary global collaboration with 20 TEDx events, collectively hosting 22 SPRINTS.

SPRINTS is an original format, developed by Fine Acts – a creative bootcamp where visual artists are briefed on a topic by experts, and then have 48 hours to produce an artwork on that specific issue. Throughout the process, artists are supported by a pool of mentors. Each edition of SPRINTS also ends with a public pop-up exhibition.

Furthermore, all visuals are published under an open license, so that activists, nonprofits, movements and educators globally can use and adapt them in their work towards climate action.

In 2023/2024, we collaborated with 13 events, hand picked by the TEDx Program. We supported the amazing TEDx teams to select awesome local visual artists, organize effective creative bootcamps and inspiring public exhibitions, and curate a host of brilliant illustration collections.

As a result, hundreds of new artworks joined our unique Artists for Climate vault with open-licensed visuals on climate change. Selected works were also featured on Fine Acts’ global platform for free socially-engaged art – TheGreats.co, where they joined The Climate Collection, an invaluable public resource with a distinct focus on hope & solutions.

Our event in China

In 2023, we partnered with TEDxHuangpu (Shanghai) – one of the most prominent TEDx events in China. The amazing team of TEDxHuangpu hand-picked a powerful group of 10 local visual artists, organized a creative bootcamp and a public exhibition, and curated and produced the brilliant collection below.

The SPRINTS and the exhibition both happened in the Wang Xiaohui Art Museum in Shanghai – a public museum, in which the works were on display until the end of 2023. The artists were also featured on stage during the latest TEDxHuangpu event.

The organizers are currently planning a subsequent tour of the works in China, in the cities along the Huangpu River, in 2024, with a number of follow-up actions.

*Meet the awesome artists (from left to right): Wanxiu Kong, Jia Zhang (Nonizm), Queeie Zhang, Dannie Zhang, Xinglong Zhan, Quanlong Li, Todd Li, Di Tang, Shuai Wang, Yuwei Huang (vivi)*

The Bootcamp & Exhibition

Reflections

“Usually, when people talk about climate change in China, the initial thought is crisis, but SPRINTS offered a different way, to use hope and solutions as a method of communicating the topic.”

— Rachel Cheng, organizer, TEDxHuangpu

“Our role was not only to support the artists, but also to create a journey and experience for everyone. We wanted to help the artists express their emotions and their ideas. And by the end of this SPRINT, their ideas and their thinking was much, much deeper.”

— Stephanie Song, organizer, TEDxHuangpu