The great assembly of figure skating stars

On April 18, the press conference for the 2012 Artistry On Ice took place at Four Points by Sheraton Beijing. Amongst the attendees at the conference, which disclosed details of the forthcoming event, were Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, the winners of the figure skating competition at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Artistry On Ice is held annually during June. In 2010 it was launched for the first time under the theme of the wedding ceremony of Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo in Beijing Capital Gymnasium.

This year's event will take place in four cities: Taipei, Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. Skaters from seven countries will participate. Kim Yu-Na, the glamorous skating queen of South Korea, will partake in the show for the first time. She will be joined by other top figure skaters, such as Evgeni Viktorovich Plushenko from Russia, Kurt Browning, the Canadian figure skater, and Shizuka Arakawa, the first Japanese skater to win an Olympic gold medal.

On top of visual satisfaction, the audience will be treated to excellent music played by Edvin Marton, the acclaimed Ukrainian composer and violinist of Hungarian ethnicity. Meanwhile, Huang Hsiao Hu, a famous singer from Taiwan, will also feature in the show.

"I hope this event will help spread this beautiful sport to China," Li Sheng, the host of the event, told the Global Times, adding that while in the West people have long watched and appreciated figure skating, here in China interest is more recent.

Sponsored by leading skincare and cosmetics company Artistry, the theme of beauty will definitely be maximized. "Figure skating has the reputation of being ballet on ice," says Tang Mei, brand director of Artistry. For Tang sponsoring this event made sense, since Artistry is about promoting physical beauty and glamour, which ties nicely into the image of figure skating.