Cecilia Paredes won the International Award for Artistic Excellence of the 2014 Ping Yao International Photography Festival held in Shanxi, China. The Award was granted in recognition of Paredes' exhibition entitled Background Stories. Curated by Australian Alasdair Foster, the show consisted of 22 large works that are part of the artist's Landscape series. In this series Paredes relies on the idea of camouflage to evoke the dilemma of immigrants and the adoption of patterns in a new environment. The exhibition will remain open through the month of October in Beijing Photo, one of the four spaces in which Background Stories will be shown. The awards were created in 2010 to commemorate the first decade of the festival. Regarded as the largest photography festival in China, the festival takes place every year. It is held in Ping Yao, an ancient walled city that was declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site. This year, the festival featured the work of 2,100 artists and photographers from 32 countries.