BRATISLAVA, March 6 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese people have a cultural tradition of collectivism, while the Western culture is usually described as individualistic. Perceiving China through the lens of a culture of individualism is incorrect and leads to misunderstandings, Slovak architect Aurel Fabri believes.

Fabri, who lived in China for 12 years and taught architectural design there, now exhibits 20 of his drawings of traditional Chinese architecture at the Chinese Embassy in Bratislava, capital of Slovakia.

At the opening of the exhibition last month, Fabri said that a positive cultural exchange between the East and the West is not only extremely important but also necessary.

China's Ambassador to Slovakia Sun Lijie agreed, highlighting Fabri's mastery of integrating Western-style sketching techniques with Chinese-style ink painting aesthetics.

Just as painting techniques and buildings with different styles can complement each other, countries with different political systems, histories and cultures can also work towards a win-win situation, Sun said.

"There is quite a difference between the culture of East Asia, including China, and the culture of the West," Fabri said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

In the culture of collectivism, the highest priority is the well-being of a collective, the well-being of a family or society. "That's much more important there than ambitions of individuals."

During the 2009 financial crisis that brought gloom to his industry, Fabri successfully applied for a teaching position at the Raffles Design Institute in Beijing. At that time, he knew almost nothing about China or its culture. The modern, well-developed city made a big impression on him. He liked Beijing, especially because of the harmony between the old and the new parts of the city.

Having stayed there for two years, he moved to Ningbo, a major city in east China's Zhejiang Province, where he taught architectural design at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China for 10 years before returning to Slovakia in 2022.

Fabri spent a lot of his free time in China traveling and drawing interesting places. As he became more familiar with Chinese culture, the influence of that began to show in his drawings.

"I didn't study Chinese drawings at all. But I was living in China and the culture there was extremely strong... You could not escape it," he told Xinhua.

The decade he spent in China left an indelible mark on his style of drawing and also on his architectural design concepts.

One inspiration he recalled came from shelves of orchid flowers in a park in Nanjing in east China's Jiangsu Province. This experience gave rise to his design of a building with many "shelves" and with large openings, where he placed trees. "It was my first step towards sustainable green design in architecture -- applying more greenery in the structure of buildings -- which is quite common today, but was not yet the case at the time," he said.

"In my opinion, such different cultures as East and West, should communicate, understand each other and learn from each other. During my stay in China, I realized that if something is different from what I am used to, that doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just different." Enditem

Related

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)