Chimera 5 - The Utopy of the Perpetual Increase by Alessandro Zannier Photo: Xu Ming/GT [Photo/globaltimes.cn]

For most people, memories revolve around specific things like a person's face, a period of romance or a piece of music. But what do memories look like in the eyes of people who usually see life from a unique angle? Taking "memory" as its theme, the ongoing 2014 Biennale China-Italia in Beijing may help provide an answer.

Opened on June 28 and running until August 20, the biennale has gathered 120 artists from Italy and China in five separate exhibitions. Their works, either concrete or abstract, allow viewers a chance to see the many different ways memories can manifest, particularly from the point of view of artists from two different cultural backgrounds.

Memory in art

One of the five exhibitions, the 798 Art Factory's Memories Toward the Past interprets memories through paintings, installation artworks and sculptures by 18 contemporary artists, including Chinese artists Qiu Zhijie, Feng Zhengjie and Li Zhanyang, and Italian artists such as Maurizio Cattelan and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

A "damaged" painting of Qingming Festival by the Riverside, broken pieces of mirrors, fragmented construction materials - walking into the main hall of the exhibition, you may already start to see these items' connection to memory.

Take Zhu Xiaodi's Master Plan along the River during the Qingming Festival for instance. The six-meter long work combines Zhu's painted recreation of the famous painting Qingming Festival by the Riverside - which captures the landscape of the city of Kaifeng during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) - with performance art by inviting several Chinese and foreign architects to draw architecture that they've previously designed over the buildings in the painting.

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