29th October – 11th November 2001
The Rotunda,
Exchange Square, Hong Kong
“Xinjiang is China’s biggest province. With an area of nearly one million square miles it is large than Britain, France, Germany and Italy put together. Much of the country is sand desert broken by high dry mountain ranges which form its political bouncaries and which criss-cross the interior. Historically and also as to the many minority people who inhabit the regin, the province is rich in interest.
The first account we have of it is that of a Chinese Monk who went on foot through Xinjian in search of the true Buddhist scriptures in the fourth century AD. His route in part, before he turned south to India, was later to be developed by Chinese and Western traders and others, and came to beknow s the Silk Road. For those early centuries and until the discovery of the sea route to the Orient in the 15th century, and long after that, the Silk Road remained an important artery of human traffic between East and West. Along its hazardous tracks Chinese silk reached Rome. Such ws the demand for it by Roman Women that at one period by imperial decree its importation was prohibited on economic grounds.
Apart from the influence of trade and traders, the other notable factor in what we see in Xinjiang today has been its importance as frontier territory between its neighbours – the peoples of China, Tibet, northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their various alliances and quarrels led to may a war waged in the territory, with occupation and counter occuptation. Those events contributed to the contemporary spectrum of different races and physical appearance of the population. Chinese, tribal indigenous people, Middle-Eastern Caucasions and others have all contributed genes to the mix of features and the variety of religious beliefs in the area.
It was to this hard land that Linda Ting Wareham travelled in September 1997. And the present exhibition consists of paintings done from the large number of sketches she made there.
With a Chinese background and training in Western art, Linda Ting Wareham would seem unusually well equipped to understand and to capture in paint the look and the feeling of the timeless land and its towns and people, much of its appearance and culture little changed until very recently. The exhibition offers a rare sight of a little-seen land with its human and animal life. The works are all the more welcome in that few painters seem to have worked in Xinjiang. Linda Ting Wareham’s oils have a quality of intimacy that springs for emotional understanding. She has managed to paint something of a way of life in a far and unfamilar country – so vividly that the viewer catches that understanbding and its empathetic vision. The character of the place springs to the eye in Lind Ting Wareham’s talented work”
Sponsors: Nedcor Bank Limited
The HongkongLand Co. Ltd.
Curator: Mr. Nigel Cameron
Linda Ting Wareham 
