New Zealand artist ponders what dreams may come in China

New Zealand filmmaker and artist Vincent Ward has an award-winning portfolio created from "carving" a place in different cultures, but in China his work has gone ahead to carve a place for him.

Best known abroad for directing the Oscar-winning 1998 feature, What Dreams May Come, and as a producer on The Last Samurai, Ward has delved back into his artistic roots in his latest venture.

Breath: The Fleeting Intensity of Life is a multimedia exhibition that captures the themes of displacement and vulnerability.

Consisting of a multi-screen cinematic installation and long, narrow paintings and photographs, Breath had a successful debut at what is arguably New Zealand's most adventurous major contemporary art venue, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, in New Plymouth.

The self-described "gypsy filmmaker" returned to Auckland to create Breath after a career that has taken him into the heart of New Zealand's indigenous Maori society and on to Hollywood, New York and remote locations, such as the Canadian Arctic, where he lived with the Inuit while making 1993's Map of the Human Heart.

Breath is already drawing international attention, notably from China.

"During the Govett-Brewster exhibition, we had a professor of art from the Shanghai Institute of Design of the Chinese Academy of Art come to see the work," Ward said. "She flew in from Shanghai and is very keen on bringing the show to Shanghai with a large exhibition next year. She and her university want to bring me across to lecture on new media, as well as exhibit."

Ward said Breath seems to have resonated with Chinese audiences, both in its form and content.

He noted the similarities between his paintings with Chinese artistic traditions: "They're very similar to Chinese scroll paintings, not only in format, but also the use of space, the use of figures and multiple timeframes in one painting.

"It has a zen-like negative space and it's figurative work, sometimes falling, sometimes floating."

A preview event is planned for November with a major exhibition next year, and the institute is keen for Ward to impart his knowledge of mixing media, in which he broke new ground with the "motion painting" technique developed for What Dreams May Come.

In the film, the main character, played by Robin Williams, inhabits an afterlife that was created by filming real scenes and then attaching colors and scanned paint strokes to individual pixels, giving the impression of a painting in motion.

While What Dreams May Come and Map of the Human Heart were both screened in Chinese cinemas, Ward's presentation of Breath will mark his first foray into China.

Ethnic Chinese New Zealand publisher and architect Ron Sang is to release a book on Ward and his work in June.

Some of Ward's films are to be featured in a New Zealand film festival in Beijing later this year.

Questions:

1. What is the latest project from New Zealand filmmaker and artist Vincent Ward?

2. What is it?

3. Where will his work be exhibited in China?

Answers:

1. Breath: The Fleeting Intensity of Life.

2. A multimedia exhibition that captures the themes of displacement and vulnerability.

3. Shanghai.