The exhibition drew a large number of visitors, and Benque considers the experiment successful.
"I think it can go some way to helping people understand one another better. You can only respect what you understand, so helping people understand the nature of different skills is important for the future," he says, adding that he would like to expand his experiment.
"I have several other ideas to that end, which I hope I will have the opportunity to develop," he says.
Right next to the China-France exhibition hall, a Sino-Korean collaborative work, Vermilion Late Autumn, presents a stunning contemporary interpretation of a bamboo forest.
Composed of vertical sheets of acrylic, perforated with thousands of tiny holes, the branches of the bamboo are picked out in silk thread embroidery. Bathed in a purple light that turns the thread a vivid orange, the thread takes on a vibrancy, shining and shimmering as it catches the light. Enhanced by new media animation, the slabs take on the appearance of a living bamboo grove.
The use of hard acrylic in place of soft fabric is one of the highlights, says Diao Juan, a fiber artist and inheritor of Sichuan embroidery, who has more than a decade of experience in this form of intangible cultural heritage.
"Each 50 centimeters by 50 cm acrylic sheet is drilled with 6,400 holes and 7,000 meters of silk thread was used to embroider the bamboo," Diao says.
The technique gave normally flat embroidery a three-dimensional quality, which Diao says is a new development in her art.
"Because of the special nature of this piece, additional holes were added wherever possible because, by its nature, bamboo has both a straightness and a curvature that can't be re-created through regular spacing," Diao says. "This made it more challenging than my previous work."
