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What are the first things that spring to mind for a Beijinger when Ireland is mentioned?
The famous "Irish Pub" in Sanlitun, Beijing's bar street, with its "Guinness" on draught? Or entertainment stars like U2 or Colin Farrell?
Ireland, the island birthplace of poet William Yeats (1865-1939) and writer Samuel Beckett (1906-89), has long been widely known in China for its literary and musical traditions but not for its visual arts.
Therefore people didn't expect much when the exhibition "Views from an Island: Works of Irish Contemporary Art from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art" opened on April 30 at the Millennium Art Museum, at the China Millennium Monument in southwestern Beijing. The exhibition, which runs until May 22, includes about 60 works from the collection of the museum, which was founded in 1991 as the first national institution for the display and collection of modern and contemporary art in Ireland.
It had an unexpected number of visitors during the seven-day holiday, partly because tourists swarming to Beijing, who didn't necessarily appreciate contemporary arts, considered the China Millennium Monument a must-see.
Although there were those who took in the show as second choice, it very decidedly won the approval of art lovers.
Xing Yunhe, an art-book editor, said it was one of the best contemporary art shows of similar scale that he has visited in the city.
Sources from the Irish museum said its collection, which is a young one, does not claim to be representative of all the best developments in recent Irish art.
Instead the museum aims to be challenging rather than comprehensive, to buy interesting artwork rather than to try to build a complete collection of the best-known artists.
Irish contemporary art began to emerge in the 1940s and picked up momentum in the 1960s when modernist Louis Le Brocquy was invited to develop a series of illustrations to accompany a new translation of the ancient Irish legend, the Tain.
The new publication of the Tain legend, one of the great heroic tales of ancient Ireland, gave the people of the island on the edge of Europe something native of which they can be truly proud.
(China Daily May 11, 2004)
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