Art exchange between India and China

A group of Indian and Chinese artists groups recently presented their works in three public spaces within the colonial part of Shanghai. This collaborative art event resulted from a series of contacts, reciprocal visits and discussions involving artists, curators and intellectuals from India and China.

The title signaled the invitation to encounter locations and histories across old and new borders. An accompanying note by Chang Tsong-Zung and Chaitanya Sambrani mentioned: “Despite market driven interest in the contemporary art of these two countries, these has been little, if any, interaction between the two art cultures in recent times. Awareness of respective art practice is limited to occasional encounters at art fairs in different parts of the world.

Place, time and play have connotations of location, history and creativity, respectively. Reckonings with place imply an understanding of contextual difference, and an attempt to enter another site or location. Taking time is both a requirement of this process, and an opportunity to encounter a different sense of historical time, and for artists to think about and work with the formidable burdens of tradition as well as current economic, political and artistic conditions.

"The invitation to 'play' is extended on the premise that idea of play (and the ludic instinct that underpins it) is a fundamentally life-affirming gesture, too often lost in the midst of the quest for topical issues that the art object must address. Through its invitation to indulge in a basic and universal human activity (and need), the project hopes to inaugurate a more lasting series of relationships between artist communities across the two nations.

“For more than a century, challenges of imperialism and capitalism have forced India and China to develop strategies that have profoundly transformed both societies. To share this experience is valuable for Indian and Chinese artists alike. For China today, after a century of revolutions, it is important to remember this history of cultural self-transformation; it is critical to remind ourselves that in our imagination of the world there is not just the West, but also the West Heavens.

Meanwhile, Guangdong Museum of Art The special unit curated by West Heavens Project for the 4th Guangzhou Triennial brought the films by the past leading Indian avant garde filmmaker Mani Kaul and the video installation works by artist Rambir Singh Kaleka to Guangzhou.