When Art Encounters the Belt and Road
Art exchange activities help china and Africa better understand each other
this was the sixth time Motondi Gerard Orro has visited China. Once a college teacher, the 52-year-old Kenyan sculptor is enthusiastic about his stone carving career and how it relates to China.
Motondi first visited China in 2006, when he was invited to the International Stone Carving Symposium in Hui’an, southeast China’s Fujian Province, and made his first stone carving work in China named Fish Family. Hui’an is famous in China for stone carving art and often invites domestic and foreign artists to its stone carving activities; but the symposium in 2006 was the first time an African artist was invited.
In the following decade, Motondi was invited to art events held in cities like Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha and Xi’an, visiting different regions of China.
But this time, his visit to China was a little different: He was here as an artist of the hosting country. On October 24, 2018, the First Belt and Road Afro-sino Art Exchange Exhibition and Afro-sino Cultural Forum was unveiled at the National Library of China in Beijing. The event was hosted by the Ministry of Sports, Culture and the Arts of Kenya, with support from the Kenyan Embassy in China and the Chinese Embassy in Kenya.
As part of the event, an art show was held in the library that featured the theme of Go to Kenya and Perceive New Africa. Of some 110 works exhibited at the show, more than half were created by 40 artists from Kenya and other African countries such as Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Tanzania. These included paintings and sculptures reflecting the daily life and folk custom of the African people. Exhibited at the show were also over 40 works from around 30 famous Chinese artists. This was the first time Kenya organized artists to show their works in China. Kiprop Lagat, Director of Culture at the Ministry of Sports, Culture and the Arts of Kenya, said that the event was a new form of cultural exchange between China and Africa and Kenya’s response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“We thought the best way of responding to this initiative would be to have mutual exchanges based on mutual respect and mutual trust, because we believe culture is a way in which we can penetrate other sectors,” Lagat told Chinafrica.