Artist couple find the perfect canvas in Songjiang

[freemexy]

Artist couple find the perfect canvas in Songjiang
An apartment within a stone’s throw from Xinqiao Art Museum in Songjiang District is where German artist Jutta Bobbe and her Chinese husband Yuan Shun currently live and work. On the fifth floor of the red-brick building, a balcony is overflowing with plants.To get more shanghai Songjiang news, you can visit shine news official website.

“I built a front garden on the fifth floor balcony of our studio. It is filled with all the exotic plants and flowers Jutta likes to find at the local market. Once in a while, flowers of different colors bloom to accompany us while we are working or taking a rest. I think the garden is my gift for Jutta,” says Yuan, a 58-year-old artist who is living and working in both China and Germany.Bobbe, the daughter of an architect, was born in 1972 and recalls many trips to museums with her father. She still uses some tools her father used at home in Germany.

“Space and construction still have a strong point in my artworks. This is in my blood,” says Bobbe.In the village of Derneburg, near Hanover, where Bobbe grew up, there is a castle which used to belong to Georg Baselitz, one of the most famous German painters. The castle was later turned into a private museum — the “Hall Art Foundation” — by an American collector.

That gave Bobbe an early connection with art and the village still exerts an influence because every time she goes back there is another new exhibition to see.Yuan likes to listen to cathedral bells on their four-month-a-year staying in Germany. For Yuan, a Shanghai native whose childhood bedtime stories touched on the Sheshan Hill and its cathedral, it represents his earliest memories.

“My mother is a native of Sijing Town in Songjiang District. When I was a boy, she used to tell me lots of things related to the old house. I was so fascinated by the story of the Sheshan Hill’s cathedral. Later, when I worked as a painter for the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy, I got to know that my colleague and well-known artist Cheng Shifa was also a Songjiang native,” says Yuan.Yuan achieved the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Grant from Berlin’s Ministry of Culture in 2001. He settled in Istanbul as the only artist representing Germany that year. When he went back to Berlin in 2002 to give a presentation, Bobbe was sitting next to him.

Yuan invited Bobbe to his solo exhibition and over the next few months they would bump into each other in exhibition halls or neighborhoods in Berlin.“This may be what Chinese people call fate. In the long years that followed, through our appreciation of each other’s charms and our acceptance of our differences, we live and work together in different countries and cities till today,” says Yuan.Hailing from different countries and with different cultural backgrounds, the couple would sometimes misunderstand even simple words.