Image: Interior of Postdamer Platz, From the Website Eventim

I then went to search for the full schedule of the performances in the seven cities around January of 2023, and found a story from Shen Yun about the dates of their performances and found the exact image from the newspaper story. The Shen Yun performance that the photo was from took place at the Chrysler Hall in Norfolk, Virginia on January 7, 2023, where three performances took place over January 7-8. After finding my answers to this exercise, I went to search more about the performance group and the newspaper company that wrote the story to learn more about their publication and to understand better as to why they covered this event.

After some initial research, I discovered that Shen Yun and The Epoch Times were both connected to a controversial Chinese spiritual movement called Falun Gong. Falun Gong, meaning Discipline of the Dharma Wheel, takes teaching from the Chinese system of Qigong (discipline of the breath), along with being inspired by other practices such as mediation, martial arts, and Chinese religious teaching such as Taoism and Buddhism. It was founded by Li Hongzhi in China in 1992, where it grew quickly due to social restrictions in China loosening around this time. This rise also saw criticism of the movement due to their superstitious beliefs and rejecting modern medicine, which eventually led to a crackdown by the Chinese government in the late 1990s and Li departing to the U.S. to avoid political issues.

Since the crackdown, the Falun Gong movement has been antagonistic towards the Chinese government. Media companies tied to the movement such as The Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty Television began in the early 2000s to highlight Falun Gong’s persecution in China and receive political support from Western countries. The Shen Yun group was formed by Falun Gong followers in 2006 to try and promote Chinese cultural traditions before the Communist Revolution in China, and has been heavily promoted by The Epoch Times since its creation. The Epoch times has also been the source of other controversies, such as the promotion of conspiracy theories and money laundering, which brings up questions about its journalistic integrity.

Answers
a) What was the audience applauding? – The performance group Shen Yun
b) When was the photo taken? – January 7, 2023
c) What is the name of the venue? – Chrysler Hall in Norfolk, Virginia

Conclusions and Takeaways
This exercise was a good way to demonstrate my skill growth of being able to navigate reverse image searching tools more efficiently, while discovering more about stories than what were initially reported after the fact. This exercise took around 10 minutes to complete, while I spent about 1 hour and 20 minutes researching the Falun Gong movement. I’ve been finding Google Images to be more reliable in finding information about the images to these exercises more than Yandex and Bing. However, I should look to try and expand this to other image searching tools or social media websites to expand my searching capabilities more and to not rely on one tool all the time. Learning about the newspaper and the performance group’s connections is a good way to show how there are biases that can be discovered and reported on to give further context about a story or photo. Being able to report and note any biases and coverage is important when writing reports to give an audience a better understanding of events and to make better decisions, which is more important for security related decisions and implications.