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QINGDAO TODAY
在线翻译:
szdaily -> Culture -> 
When Arabian Art Meets Greater Bay Area
    2019-08-15  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

Sally Wang

sallywlwang@hotmail.com

A GROUP of nine established Arab artists recently attended a workshop entitled “The Insight of China” and created dozens of works centering on the Greater Bay Area, bringing fresh perspectives and unique insights to this booming southern region. Their works, on exhibition free-of-charge at the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute in Luohu District until Aug. 20, have aroused audiences’ curiosity — what kind of brilliant artistry results when Arab artists meet with Chinese culture?

Sponsored by China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, “The Insight of China” has attracted 158 Arab artists to create nearly 500 painting and sculpture works in China since 2009.

This year’s Arab artists, including two women artists, are from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Oman and Tunisia. After sightseeing and visiting cultural places in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macao for eight days, they returned to Shenzhen and spent 10 days visiting the city and creating art based on the impressions and memories they gained from their trip through the Greater Bay Area.

Chinese characters and calligraphy, cranes and dragons, bamboo and lotus flowers, as well as Mahjong motifs were among the Chinese elements that appeared in these Arab artists’ works. Chinese characters were written, inscribed, or cut from newspapers and pasted onto canvases, adding extra oriental zing to the pictures.

Ahmed Moqeem from Kuwait has affixed a couple of poetic lines to his painting entitled “Me and Landscape,” featuring himself lying above the greenness of trees, lotus leaves and duckweed. “In China, I feel like a lotus leaf floating on the water, so bold and so simple,” the lines say.

While artists captured the natural simplicity and tranquility of the Chinese South, they also focused on the urban side of the Greater Bay Area. High buildings and bridges as well as landmark skyscrapers and monuments appear in these artists’ works of the bordering cities, leaving us to think over our ever-changing surroundings. The bamboo images made of newspaper clippings and other mixed materials to imitate high-rises were created by Moroccan artist Khalid El Bekay, bringing a sense of coolness to the metropolitans he featured, whereas blocks of buildings featuring various geometric shapes and contrasting colors in the paintings of another Moroccan artist, Ahmed El Hayani, “Which Behind the Border” and “Wall of History.” In these pieces, he recreated the jungles of concrete and steel we modern people live in.

Sometimes we really need others, like artists, and especially foreign artists, to remind us of the beautiful ingredients present in our mundane lives. “The Pink Life” by Kuwaiti artist and film director Asad Bunashi depicts a woman sweeping beside a pink factory building, capturing vividly the cozy daily lives of ordinary people in Shenzhen. Oman artist Saud Hanini’s two paintings of Lamma Island told of how quiet and peaceful life on an island in Hong Kong could be.

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Shenzhen Daily E-mail:szdaily@szszd.com.cn