Fireworks 烟火

Since the mid- 2 0 1 0 s my yearly calendar started to include the Chinese (Lunar) New Year celebrations. I have never been too fond of the Christmas and New Year period, which I have always found to be too short and somewhat gloomy. In Finland, people ‘hide’ with their relatives for several days to celebrate and life stops on the streets. At different periods of my life, I would either spend quality time with my grandmother, just the two of us, watching films, reading and writing, or I would travel to far- away places (India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, etc.). Since I stopped traveling in 2020, I stay at home for the holiday season today. The holidays are then just ‘normal days’. When Chinese New Year entered my life, it brightened up the months of January and February. Some years ago, I spent a couple of weeks in the North of China during the Lunar New Year celebrations. It was a small town. What surprised me most was the fact that people were setting off fireworks 24/7. I could see thousands of different colours and hear explosions from my hotel window all the time. This self-portrait shows me wearing my favourite hat and scarf during Chinese New Year. It is very cold (see my face) and yet the colourful traces left by the fireworks behind me are in harmony with my scarf, and create a very energetic and positive atmosphere. 

自2010年中起，我的年度日历就开始包含中国（农历）新年庆祝活动。我从未特别喜欢圣 诞节和新年这段时间，因为我总觉得这段时间太短，而且有些沉闷。在芬兰，人们会和家 人一 起“躲藏”几天来庆祝，街上的生活也随之停止。在我生命的不同阶段，我会要么 和我祖母两个人一起度过美好的时光，看电影、阅读和写作，要么去遥远的地方（印度、 印度尼西亚、日 本、墨西哥等）旅行。自从2020年停止旅行后，我现在会在假期期间待在 家里。假期就变成了“平常日子”。当中国新年进入我的生活时，它点亮了一月和二月。 几年前，我在农历新年庆祝活动期间在中国北方待了几个星期。那是一个小镇。最让我惊 讶的是，人们全天候都在放烟花。我可以从酒店窗户看到成千上万种不同的颜色，并一直 听到爆炸声。这幅自画像展示了我在中国新年期间戴着我最喜欢的帽子和围巾。天气很冷 （看我的脸），但烟花在我身后留下的彩色痕迹与我的围巾相得益彰，营造出一种非常活 力和积极的气氛。

BIODATA - 艺术家简介

A renowned scholar in the field of intercultural communication and education, Fred Dervin (Chinese name: 文德 Wende) is also an artist. He holds two PhDs (Sorbonne University in Paris and University of Turku, Finland), is a full professor and PhD supervisor at the University of Helsinki, Finland.  Dervin also holds several distinguished and visiting professorships in Australia, Canada, China, Luxembourg, Malaysia and Sweden, as well as in other Finnish universities. Dervin has published internationally on questions of identity, interculturality and mobility/migration (over 150 articles and 80 books). His interest in art began when he was a teenager and has continued to grow over the decades. Over the past decade, he has produced artworks in China and Finland to showcase his scientific ideas. His commitment to the arts has also influenced his personal research (e.g. the benefits of arts education for intercultural communication). For decades he has collected and specialized in Finnish art from the mid-20th century and since 2015 he has been actively involved in producing his own art in relation to his research work. In his 2022 book entitled Interculturality in Fragments: A Reflexive Approach (Springer), he included 10 of his works of art to stimulate his readers to think beyond words about intercultural communication and education. He is just about to publish a book on art and interculturality in education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

Dervin is interested in the complexity of depicting faces in his art work by using different techniques. Interestingly, the Finnish word "face", "kasvot", always appears in the plural, which piqued his curiosity about the human face. This interest also comes from his scientific research on identity and intercultural communication, as well as his experience of living in different parts of the world.

文德是世界跨文化教育领域的知名学者，同时还是一位优秀的艺术家。他拥有法国索邦大学和芬兰图尔库大学两所世界知名古老院校的博士学位。现担任芬兰赫尔辛基大学的终身教授及博士生导师，同时还在世界各国及地区担任荣誉教授和客座教授。他发表了超过150篇学术性文章和80余部学术专著，探讨关于身份、跨文化交流与教育、流动迁移等社会问题。他对艺术的兴趣始于青少年时期，经过多年的积累形成了自己独特的艺术风格。在过去的十几年中，他在中国与芬兰这两个他热爱的土地上创作了许多带有鲜明个人特色的作品。同时，他将艺术创作与个人学术研究相结合，并放入个人著作中，以帮助读者更好地理解和思考研究背后的故事和意义。特别是近一年间，他对脸和镜子进行了细致地观察和理解，并创作了许多富有内涵和想象力的创作，这些作品部分也将会出现在他明年的著作中。