Rediscovering Eastern roots

• Source: Global Times
• [10:45 September 08 2010]
• Comments

Qin Siyuan, director of the ShContemporary. Photo: Courtesy of Qin Siyuan

By Wang Yufeng

When Qin Siyuan's 86-year-old grandmother was approaching the end of her life in the UK, she wanted to return her hometown. Like fallen leaves returning to their roots, the Chinese-born British woman was buried in 1990 among her ancestors in Beijing.

It was at her funeral that China first captured Qin's imagination, even though he had already spent several years living here as a boy. The now 39-year-old, whose mother is Chinese and father is British, would eventually return to China as well. But unlike his grandmother, who returned to China to meet death, Qin came to China to build a life.

Qin is now the director of the ShContemporary, an International Art Exhibition in Shanghai, which runs from September 9 to September 12.

A childhood in China

Qin's mother had moved to the UK with her parents as a child during the World War II. She married a British man who was something of a Sinophile. He was interested in Chinese culture and taught Chinese at a university.

In 1979, when Qin was 8 years old, he went to Beijing to learn martial arts. As a youth, he fantasized about becoming a kung fu master. While studying, he attended a local primary school where he picked up the language from the local students. He got to fulfill his kung fu dream in a way when he was cast in the 1984 movie Shaolin Temple 2: Kids from Shaolin, which starred Li Lianjie, better known to Western audiences as Jet Li. Soon after the movie finished filming, he returned to the UK, but took little of China home with him. "Even though I had lived in China for about three years, you could only say that I was familiar with China; I had no special interest in it," Qin told the Global Times.

Qin continued to live in Britain through middle school and high school and attended the University of Edinburgh, where he majored in computer science. Like many Western boys, he did not feel close to China, he said. At that point, the time he spent in China was fading from his memory. His kung fu fantasy had been replaced with the more mundane aspirations of securing a good job with a high salary in the UK after graduation.