AQUA SERIES,1989

Where Water Flows

It is a great pleasure and an honor for me to participate in today's vernissage. I am grateful for this opportunity.

This show is entitled "where water flows". Lin Hsin Hsin employs new techniques with oil in order to express in painting the sensuous experience and the essence of that basic element of nature: water.

In choosing water as the theme of her show, Lin Hsin Hsin has elected a subject that can give cause to manifold reflections. Ultimately they lead to one realization, there has always been water. Without water there can be no life. Water is fundamental, water is timeless, water is essential. In a sense one can say: water is nature, water is truth.

Hsin Hsin is this once again, I should say, for her last series was based on music -- dealing with the elements of nature. she examines and explores, reflects and contemplates upon them. In doing so, the link between our natural environment and human nature becomes evident, and we, the viewers of her art, find ourselves drawn into the same reflective mood.

Knowing that Hsin Hsin is also a passionate poet, I would like to cite William Wordsworth who must have been inspired by similar thoughts when in his Ode, "Intimations of Immortality" he invoked the symbolic force of water.

he wrote:

Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence: truths that wake
To perish never
Which neither listlessness nor mad endeavour
Nor man nor boy
Nor all that is at emnity with joy,
can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather
though in land far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
and hear the mighty waters rolling ever more.

I wish to thank the Deutsche Bank for making this show possible. Deutsche Bank - next to being the Federal Republic of Germany's largest bank, is one of the most important patrons of the art in my country. I welcome warmly their present contribution to the already rich and fruitful cultural exchange between Singapore and the Federal Republic of Germany.

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Today's show, a cooperation between an eminent Singaporean artist and an eminent German Bank, is a good start in this direction.

Opening speech of the "where water flows" exhibition by
Dr Karl Spalcke, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany
July 4, 1989

Aqua Series

• fizz in Vitamin C, 1988
• à la belle éoile, 1988
• piazza dei fiotti, 1988
• piazza d'acqua, 1988
• aqueous wafer, 1988
• laundry - primitive style, 1988
• palm spring, 1989
• layers of time, 1989
• rush to flush, 1989