Twenty years after her first exhibition in Hong Kong as part of Le French May, Fabienne Verdier returns with a retrospective exhibition at City Hall. The exhibition traces her career from her initial, classical calligraphy right through to the major works that have seen her receive international acclaim. A prize-winning graduate from Toulouse Art School, Verdier went to Sichuan in 1983 to be taught by the Grand Master Calligraphers, and casualties of the Cultural Revolution. While Verdier’s work is rooted in the teachings of Chinese calligraphy, she did not merely imitate the old masters but worked from their perspective when she under took her analysis of all western contemporary painting, especially the semiology behind the work of the great French and American abstract painters. Following her education in Sichuan, she has continued to use ink – although pigments are now incorporated – and above all the Chinese ink brush. Here again, she has innovated, going so far as to bind the hair from 35 horse tails in one immense brush that holds 60 litres of ink. It is so heavy that she had to invent a special system to keep the brush suspended whilst allowing it freedom of movement. Latterly, with Chinese painting techniques in mind, Verdier has reinterpreted the works of the great Flemish masters. This cultural cross-over enabled her to find a spectacular, innovative reading of their work for her latest exhibition in Belgium at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, to which visitors flocked. Le French May Arts Festival is therefore honoured to present work that is both steeped in Chinese culture and a forerunner in western contemporary art, to the Hong Kong public. For the exhibition, Le French May, together with the exhibition curator Daniel Abadie, is publishing a book tracing the artist’s career from her arrival in Sichuan through to her current large-scale works, where the free-moving brush, leaves, as it were, its memory of ink on canvas.