New Zealand-based artist John Reynolds' text-bricks artwork is on display at the 2010 Art Beijing contemporary art fair in Beijing on April 29, 2010. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com/Xie Tingting]

This May Day holiday, you can travel to Shanghai for the World Expo, or visit Beijing for a mini world expo of art.

The 5th annual Art Beijing contemporary art fair, one of China's major art occasions, opened Thursday with a VIP preview. Asian and Western art lovers crowded the Agricultural Exhibition Center, where 70 art galleries from as many as 18 countries and regions were exhibiting.

Artwork shown at the fair is diversified, offering a sense of multiculturalism.

Dozens of palm-size bricks form an eye-catching display inside the space of Starkwhite, a gallery hailing from Auckland, New Zealand. The work looks like a finished building toy we used to play with those wooden cubes in our childhood. Each column, colored either red, black, green, pink, grey, blue or yellow, consists of several brick canvases which are printed with English and Chinese words. For example, one column reads, "I don't speak any Chinese. Do you speak English? Pretty good. Not bad."

This work was created by New Zealand-based artist John Reynolds during his two-week residency in Beijing prior to the Art Beijing fair.

Dominic Feuchs, representative of the Starkwhite gallery, introduces Reynolds and his creation. "He does a lot of text-based artwork. As part of the fair, he has done a two-week residency in Beijing with the idea to somehow reflect his experiences in Beijing and in China... [For this piece of work] he used text taken from a Mandarin phrasebook. So you get John's experiences of coming to China and trying to understand a different culture."

A few steps away from John Reynolds' text-bricks creation, another wall of Starkwhite's space is decorated with three photographs that show Expo sites under construction in Shanghai. These photographs were taken in 2009 by Chinese photographer Jin Jiangbo, whom Starkwhite also represents.

"You see this wonderful documentation of a rapidly transforming city," Feuchs comments.

Besides worldwide galleries, foreign embassies in Beijing also appeared at the fair to exhibit works created by artists from or based in their countries.

Embassy of Ireland, for instance, presents a series of drawings created by Moscow-born artist Varvara Shavrova, who is now based in Beijing but spends every summer in Ireland.

The drawing series, entitled "Landscapes with Rain Clouds", created last summer, were inspired from the views that Shavrova enjoyed daily from the window of her studio in Ballycastle, Ireland.

Shavrova drew the landscapes without much color. "Because I think black-and-white is beautiful and it also shows the mood and the emotional side of the landscape very well."

Shavrova, who has been living in Beijing since 2005 and has done projects about Peking Opera and the traditional hutong neighborhoods, also talked about her experience as a foreign artist in Beijing. "I think China is a very good place for artists to be in. Not just for Chinese artists, but also for Western artists. It's a very exciting ground."