"Having been to China for several times as a lonesome traveler,
I have finally got the chance to have face-to-face, in-depth
communication with a host of Chinese artists."
With great excitement, Hartwig Ebersbach, a veteran abstract oil
painter from Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany, talked about his
10-day-long intimate encounter with Chinese artists last November
in picturesque Mountain Wuyi in East China's Fujian Province.
His visually striking series entitled "Mt Wuyi, A Knight Riding
on the Rainbow," is included in "Imageries of Mt Wuyi," a joint art
exhibition which, after a month-long run in Beijing's Sunshine Art
Center, will be staged at the Shanghai Art Museum from July 23 to
August 23, before moving to Hamburg in November and Berlin in
December.
This grand exhibition features at least 150 works of oil
paintings, Chinese paintings, acrylics on canvas, and mixed media
works created by 46 other artists from China and Germany last
November at Mt Wuyi, said Ma Jun, a curator at Sunshine Art
Center.
The inter-cultural event, held from November 20-30, was jointly
sponsored by China Oil Painting magazine, Shanghai Spring
Season Art Salon, the Sunshine Art Center and the Wuyishan people's
government.
It was characterized by a rich variety of activities, ranging
from on-site sketches and paintings, visits to villages where
artists glimpsed the centuries-old tea industry and local tea
culture, a local museum with archaeological finds, to local opera
shows and academic seminars.
"As far as I know, this is the largest gathering ever staged in
China for artists from Europe and China," said Shang Hui, a
Beijing-based art critic and director of the Art Museum of Beijing
Traditional Chinese Painting Institute.
Although they were all "submerged" in the same context a famous
Chinese mountain which has inspired generations of Chinese poets,
painters and scholars for thousands of years, the artists from the
two sides demonstrated clear differences in their rendering of
similar subject matters, Shang noted.
"It is an interesting phenomenon for me to see that, in general,
artists from the Chinese side tend to portray what they see and
they feel in a mild, figurative and realistic approach, no matter
what media they employ; meanwhile, their German counterparts are
more willing to deal with their works in an abstract, radical
fashion," said Shang, adding that "this may find the roots in their
different cultural backgrounds."
However, as seen by Wang Huaiqing, a participating Chinese
artist, the difference shows exactly the charms of two widely
different cultures. "It is the difference that brings us together
at Mt Wuyi," he said. Although the artists from the two countries
talked with each other with the help of interpreters, "I think we
could really communicate with our hearts. And we have achieved a
deeper appreciation and mutual respect for the art and cultures of
the two countries," Wang explained.
Detlof Graf von Borries, another participating artist and a
philanthropist who has engaged in charity projects for impoverished
rural Chinese teenagers for at least 20 years, speaks of the
intercultural event in this way: "Venturing into one of the most
beautiful mountains where Chinese culture abounds, German artists
have come to realize that they still know too little about
China."
In his opinion, "the gathering of artists from both countries is
just a beginning for inter-cultural communication."
During a recent press conference in Beijing, some German artists
proposed a similar intercultural event next year in Germany so that
Chinese artists could have a closer look at their German
counterparts and their unique culture.
(China Daily July 18, 2006)
