Western oil meets eastern ink in abstract paintings

(ECNS) – The joint exhibition "Abstraction – Ingeborg zu Schleswig-Holstein and Shan Fan" announced its grand opening at Beijing's Today Art Museum on Thursday afternoon.

The exhibition is a dialogue between Ingeborg zu Schleswig-Holstein's abstract colors and Shan Fan's traditional ink, and explores the difference between the eastern and western artists' understanding of the abstract.

Schleswig-Holstein, with royal ancestry stemming from both Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great, builds a gorgeous, noble, and passionate inner world with rich and powerful colors in her paintings.

Most of Schleswig-Holstein's works are untitled, a move she says to leave more space for the audience to imagine.

Chinese artist Shan Fan uses his brush to draw bamboo with a rhythmic circularity and an "impressionistic" nature.

Born in China's Hangzhou, Shan went to Germany to study art in the late 1980s. He says the experience gave him a chance to seek and achieve a kind of pure abstract expression through traditional brush ink images.

His series "Painting in the Slowness" is comprised of oils on canvas with Chinese traditional techniques. Shan says he employed an extremely slow and deliberate technique to express a decidedly eastern flavor of the abstract.

The exhibition will last till April 12.