Art show displays creative exchange

Three decades have since passed. To mark the historical moment, an exhibition, Artistic Splendours, looks back on 30 years of contemporary art from China and Singapore. It is held at the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, which runs until Wednesday. The exhibition celebrates the 30th anniversary of Suzhou Industrial Park, which has become a model of international cooperation that shows the accomplishments and innovations of China's reform and opening-up since the late 1970s.

Xu Jiang, one of the exhibition's chief curators, an artist and vice-chairperson of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, says that the exhibition initiates an intensified cultural dialogue. "It dwells on people's emotional attachment of their homeland, urban construction, concerns with environmental protection, and hope for the future," Xu says. "It is sharing our feelings. It is like taking turns singing and ultimately joining in the same melody."

The exhibition also features the works of Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010), a key persona in the cultural exchanges between China and Singapore.

Wu was trained in China and France. Standing at the crossroads of the East and the West, he left an oeuvre that integrates the aesthetics and intellectual temperament of Chinese culture with the abstract tendency of Western art.

Wu traveled to Singapore several times, where he painted and exhibited. His works gained popularity among local art lovers, and a gallery at the National Gallery Singapore was named after him, displaying his donated works.