Charles Green (left), president of the Sunrise Bank of Atlanta, and Lani Wong (right), chair of the National Association of Chinese Americans.

The Sunrise Bank of Atlanta hosted the farewell reception Sept. 8 for the 38-person visiting delegation from Chengdu, China, in keeping with its policy of reaching out to international clients as well as supporting the arts.

“We’re always looking to add more international clients,” Charles Green, president of the community bank located downtown, told GlobalAtlanta.

Mr. Green, who is also the chairman of the Fulton County Arts Council, added, however, that he readily offered to host the reception at the bank because of its support for cultural exchanges.

“These performances were like nothing I’d ever seen before,” he said of presentations at the Georgia Tech Ferst Center for the Arts. “Exchanges of this sort provide a glimpse into someone else’s world.”

The “fire-eating and face-change” act was one of the most dynamic of the performance.

He added that he particularly enjoyed the dancing and the “fire-eating and face-change act,” in which the performers changed their facial expressions by slipping one mask over another. “I couldn’t figure out how they did it,” he said.

The cultural gala marked the end of a birthday celebration for one-year-old Mei Lan, the offspring of giant pandas Lun Lun and Yang Yang, natives of a panda reserve near Chengdu. Mei Lan was born at Zoo Atlanta on Sept. 6 last year.

Atlanta and Chengdu officials unabashedly used the event to establish closer business and cultural ties. In addition to the cultural gala at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Chengdu business representatives met with members of the World Trade Center Atlanta to discuss investment opportunities.

Twenty-one of the visiting delegations were artists, including acrobats, dancers and an artist who could use his hands to create a new universe of creatures in a shadow box.

Zeng Wanming, vice mayor of Chengdu’s municipal government, led the Chengdu delegation. Qiao Hong, China’s consul general in Houston, and Li Jiping, the Houston consulate general’s cultural counselor, also attended.

Fulton County Commissioner Robb Pitts represented the county at the cultural evenings.