“It is said that two thousand years ago, two priests brought the first Buddhist scriptures from India to China on the back of a pure white horse,†Clare Pennington wrote in The New York Times.
As with those Buddhist scriptures millennia ago, Ms.Pennington wrote, “paintings covered in bindis, sculptures crafted in the furniture markets of Mumbai and miniature cities bent from the metal of India's scrap heaps,†have traveled into the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a prominent contemporary art museums in China for the show “Indian Highway.â€
Produced in conjunction with London's Serpentine Gallery the show features 29 artists and 130 individual pieces, she wrote. And it is “the largest show of art from India to ever make it to China, where any display of culture from India is rare.â€
In an article about this exhibit, the state-run Beijing News asked : “Will Indian art overtake China's?†One Chinese Internet user wrote on a microblog that the exhibit showed that “between our countries, there is underlying but fierce competition.â€
Some in China worried that Guy and Myriam Ullens, the founders of the art center here and owners of an important collection of Chinese art, were shifting their interests from Chinese to Indian art. Last year they put 105 Chinese pieces up for auction, while several of the works on show in Beijing are Indian additions to their collection.
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