Luo Songsong

    songsongluo@126.com

    SOME 50 local cultural celebrities gathered at Shenzhen Fine Art Institute on the evening of Dec. 9 to appreciate an art exhibition, themed “Abstractions” by German Princess Ingeborg Zu Schleswig-Holstein.

    Invited as a visiting artist by the institute, Schleswig-Holstein exchanged ideas with the local artists. She has created about 30 abstract art pieces during her stay as a guest artist at Shenzhen Fine Art Institute during the past two months.

    “Instead of merely recording the physical world around me, I prefer to visualize the world of my inner self by creating a new universe of the unseen with the instrument of color in its beauty and strength,” she said.

    In the 1980s, Schleswig-Holstein studied in P.S.1, a renowned art academy in New York and later worked with music, the experiences of which were said to have had great influence on her art career.

    She points out that people enjoy music but seldom pose questions about its abstraction, and are used to listening without being able to recognize any subject matter or to follow any discernible story line.

    She likes to compare herself to a music composer and believes that both media allow people to travel in the mind and spirit through a non-physical world, and thereby experience meditation.

    “Color can touch your soul in a similar way as music. Yet the prerequisite for embarking on such a journey is our willingness to embrace this chance by creating the stillness in our heart,” she said.

    Schleswig-Holstein says a domain of parallel truth is created through her paintings, which can make hidden themes become visible. For her, art is a form of research, an investigation of the unknown, of those aspects of existence which remain elusive and evade disclosure.

    Shan Fan, a close friend of Schleswig-Holstein and professor from the University of Applied Science in Hamburg, also had his works exhibited in the exhibition. In contrast to purely abstract art, he brought a conceptional oil painting using the Chinese element of ink bamboo.

    Time: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., until Dec. 15, closed Mondays

    Venue: Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, 36 Jinhu Road 1, Yinhu, Luohu District

    Buses: 69 (Shenzhen Fine Art Institute Stop), 4, 5, 7, 201, 218, 222, 301, 360, 315 (Yinhu Bus Station Stop)