"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 Mt 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 Centre, 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 Centre.

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 Centre 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)