WATW is short for We Are The World. The song (written by Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson) was originally written for a 1985 campaign against famine in Ethiopia, later hijacked for a multitude of other purposes, focusing on issues of solidarity as well as mutual responsibility. In the framework of this 2009/2010 travelling exhibition, a collaboration between the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing, CN) and Paradox (Edam, NL), the project is referring to the latter notion: common responsibility for the highly complex, culturally, economically and socially interrelated world we are living in. We Are the World is photography in its most powerful form. The works in the exhibition and in this book are by inspired photographers with a sharp eye. They reveal their engagement with their subjects, without entirely losing themselves in them. That is a quality which one may expect of an artist in general, and of a photographer in particular. Both the Dutch and Chinese photographers show a world in which old ties are gradually losing their power everywhere under the influence of globalisation, while new bonds still have to be tested. International cultural exchanges can play an important role in this reorientation process. They can prevent our overestimating the reciprocal similarities and ignoring the significance of the differences.