Cultures converge in Irish Wave project

"When I come to China I am always riveted by the multilayered way the city is put together," says Gunn. "You've got often incredibly beautiful things side by side with

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horrendous monstrosities, and you have the old and the new and destruction going on. But at the same time you have incredibly exciting construction going on."

For Beijing Poem, Gunn researched contemporary Chinese poets and used their work, in English and Chinese, on a piece which resembles a fold-out Chinese screen, decorated with sketching and collage. Motifs of Chinese money and architecture are dominant.

Chinese artist Luo Ying's piece Chinese Fans evokes the rich history of the Chinese craft of fan decoration, but she uses digital lines to create the work.

"Chinese painting needs a new language," Luo says of her use of computers. She says the digital line represents science and technology, but by using it to draw traditional motifs she draws juxtaposition between the traditional and contemporary. She says both Chinese and Irish art is "looking for a new language".

Co-curator and participating artist Sean Campbell from Belfast has two pieces in Convergence. Both play with color and form. Memories of a Place I Have Never Seen is a slide projector viewers can scroll through to see the ink blots projected onto two canvases of delicate white landscapes, a play of light and texture. Campbell's other work, All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer (X Scape VII and VIII) also features a raised white landscape, but this one also includes three-dimensional toy soldiers.

"(The pieces are) very much looking back at my own past and the notion of play is very important," Campbell says.

Campbell has been involved in Irish Wave exhibitions before. "I think a lot of Irish Wave is about cross-cultural exchange. It's also between the north (Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom) and the south of Ireland as well as the East and the West."

He says he has found art-lovers in China enthusiastic to view Irish art and bring their own viewpoint to the work.

"People make their own interpretations of what they are looking at so people may look at my work and see something completely different than I would see," says Campbell, who says the exhibition is a great way to promote people-to-people exchange between Ireland and China. "We get to meet the artists, we get to talk to them. There will be six (Chinese) artists coming back to Belfast in September this year. There is great exchange in both directions and that side of it is building."

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