Asian & African and Mediterranean International Modern Art Exhibition 2015 Preface

The 12th Asian & African & Mediterranean International Modern Art Exhibition is upon us.  This November (2015) we, once more, celebrate the unity and diversity of artists, venue(s), sponsors and art lovers in the especial series of exhibitions created to enhance artistic understanding. 

The main exhibition is situated in the previous year’s, extremely spacious and well equipped, Shang Kun Luo Qi International Modern Art Museum, within Hangzhou's expanding environs. The annual international exhibition's founder and coordinator, Associate Professor Luo Qi, from the illustrious China Academy of Art has, once more, brought together a coterie of exhibitors and exhibitions of which the main 12th Asian & African & Mediterranean International Modern Art Exhibition is the vanguard.

For well over a decade Luo Qi’s diligence has enabled citizens of Hangzou, Zhejiang Province, foreign visitors, business people and those with interests in art to see a melange of intriguing artworks from a wide range of countries. This year is no exception. Countries as diverse as Canada, France, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mauritius, Portugal, Russia, Thailand, and of course from China itself, all feature in a range of exhibitions across Zhejiang Province, as well as taking part in what promises to be the most spectacular, sublime and surely the most thought-provoking exhibition in Hangzhou, yet.

To further the understanding of the scope of this series of annual exhibitions, I could express about Chinese trade routes, the Mediterranean Basin or Nanyang. I could explain that, in antiquity, Chinese peoples were explorers with great armadas of gigantic nine-masted ships, with twelve sails apiece (much larger than the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s ships). I could explain about the ancient voyages of Zheng (Ma) He (from Yunnan province), the imperial Chinese armada which between 1405 AD and 1433 AD visited the Straits of Malacca, Sumatra, Ceylon, India and across the Arabian sea. I could persuade readers that Chinese fleets visited the African peninsular, taking back giraffes, zebras and ostriches to China, then to the Swahili Coast, and finally back across the oceans to visit the Red Sea and Mecca. But this series of Luo Qi’s annual exhibitions is not about a singular collective noun, not just Nanyang, not just about the Mediterranean Basin, or even the sea voyages of the greatest fleet the world had ever known; but about Art, its divers originators, their myriad philosophies and their incipient camaraderie.

Luo Qi never disappoints. Whether it is his own stimulating works in his unique ‘Characterism” or ‘Calligraphyism’ style, blending aspects of Chinese and Western artistic practices and ideas, or whether he is collecting, collating and combining various elements to present to an excited public in his curated exhibitions, Luo Qi always demonstrates his ability to surprise and delight. This year’s series of larger and smaller exhibitions are no exception.

I am both proud and honoured to be considered to be part of this annual and ongoing revelation of the practice of art and its exhibition. I consider myself fortunate to be able to rub shoulders with some of the most important ‘makers’ from across the world, and talk with them, about their work. For this I thank Associate Professor Luo Qi, and all his sponsors, large and small.