February 20 – June 27, 2004
Gulnisa Mahat
Tending the Garden
In collaboration with the China International Exhibition Agency in Beijing, Meridian International Center presents Ancient Threads, Newly Woven: Recent Art from China's Silk Road beginning February 20, 2004. The exhibition of 78 paintings by contemporary artists from China's western region highlights the multi-cultural aspect of the Silk Road, the ancient caravan route that linked East and West for centuries.
Immense, remote and utterly different from the rest of China, the far west has in recent years produced a large number of new artists whose work has rarely been seen outside China. The exhibition assembles works collected on several trips to China's western regions by a group of Chinese and American curators and experts that became known as the "Silk Road Team."
The new artists whose works are exhibited all come from famous cities along the Silk Road: Xian, China's ancient capital where the Silk Road began; Lanzhou; Dunhuang, famous for its grottoes adorned with Buddhist painting and sculpture; Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang; and Kashgar, in the heart of Central Asia where China borders Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kazakhstan. Once rest stops along the Silk Road, these cities today are rapidly growing and changing as China's western regions develop. Their populations, too, are changing, and with them popular culture has evolved, as China's remote west joins the mainstream economic growth of the country as a whole. Academies of music, dance and fine arts ensure the integrity of traditional cultural forms, even as new influences enter the region. For this reason, this exhibit, which shows the cultural interaction of the Uighur peoples native to the region and Han Chinese, makes an especially timely contribution to the understanding of how China's far west is changing at an important moment in its long history.
Ancient Threads displays the work of over 65 artists who, in different mediums, including oil, acrylic, pen and ink and woodblock, convey some of the natural innocence and beauty found along the Silk Road. With glowing, almost flamboyant colors in the naïve "Farmer Paintings" from Kashgar and painstaking details in gentle portraits and landscapes from Urumqi, this exhibit shows viewers a meeting place of East and West.
A national tour, organized by Meridian's Traveling Exhibition Service, will follow the Washington showing. The first stop will be at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington, with succeeding venues in San Francisco, New York and other cities throughout the United States.
Several artists from the western regions plan to journey to Washington for the Press Preview on Thursday, February 19.
Supported by our partner : Sud Séminaires seminaire entreprise lieu seminaire
