30 years of India-ASEAN ties celebrated through an art camp in Udaipur. Meet the artists

Twenty artists from India and ASEAN countries shared colours, cultures and canvases at this nine-day artists’ camp in Udaipur

Easels dot a vast, lush lawn as Udaipur’s Aravalli hills look over protectively. Canvases strewn with colour, personality and culture are on these easels, signaling various stages of completion.

The hills easily make for a muse. So does the moon that rises every night between them. Both have managed to make their way into most canvases here as artists from India and ASEAN countries collaborated over a nine-day camp.

Take 26-year-old Vietnamese artist Flinh’s work: calming shades of blue wash over a canvas textured with crumpled paper, its protagonists being the moon and the ocean. The former seeps into the latter, leaving what can only be called as a “gentle, reflective” quality to mark their connection. “A lot of my work is the dialogue between the past and the present, the old and the new,” says Flinh.

Flinh is one of the 20 artists that participated in the camp titled Oceans of Connectivity at Taj Aravali Resort and Spa, Udaipur, organised by the Ministry of External Affairs and creative arts company Seher, that culminated in an exhibition on Tuesday in the presence of the Minister of State, Ministry of External Affairs, Dr Rajkumar Ranjan Singh.

“Oceans connect these countries. Oceans also give them livelihood, with maritime trade. Interestingly enough, these very oceans are the borders that separate them too. So, it’s interesting to see the artists’ interpretation of this theme,” says the founder of Seher, Sanjeev Bhargava. The enmeshing of cultures which could pave the way to public diplomacy is the objective of the camp, he adds. And the arts prove as the ideal tool to implement this. While the ASEAN artists are recommended by their respective culture ministries, the repository of Indian artists at the camp lacked representation from Southern parts of India. 

Over nine days, several hours of conversations, few workshops and a day out in the city, a mostly abstract display came to fruition. While some experimented, others stuck to their preferred styles.