Women’s Day: dialogue of Chinese and Maltese artists

As the world celebrates women next week, two female artists – one Chinese and the other from Malta – will enter into a dialogue about nature, humankind and the cosmos. In an exhibition of paintings at the China Cultural Centre, Valletta, Ya Li’s vast spaces contrast with Catherine Cavallo’s humanity. Ms Cavallo destroys the precarious balance and produces strain, stress and tension, and the world she paints is imperfect compared to the perfectly ideal one created by Ms Li, according to curator E.V. Borg. Ms Li’s expression is poetic and delicate, where nature predominates, while humans, perhaps diminutive, are present without intruding. Her work emanates a contemplative and meditative feeling, and there is a kind of empathy with nature. Meanwhile, with Ms Cavallo’s work there is a great effusion of emotion, a strong, vigorous, palpitating movement, a hustle and bustle of people, a thronging crowd of seething humanity. Human beings dominate nature and space in the work, Mr Borg explains. The exhibition Nature, Man and the Cosmos – Dialogue between Ya Li and Catherine Cavallo – is one among the China Cultural Centre’s Women’s Culture Month events. The fine art exhibition is being...