Congolese artist sees big picture

Congolese painter Theodore Akonga touches up a self-portrait that explores retaining a sense of self and cultural identity while immersed in a foreign country. [Photo by Mike Peters / China Daily]

In a Kansas schoolyard in 1979, alone in a crowd of children at play, Theodore Jonas Akonga made a discovery that would determine the course of his adult life.

Newly arrived in the United States, the 7-year-old from what was then Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was isolated from the other children by barriers of language and culture.

In that lonely place, Akonga found his voice and his calling.

He spoke to his playmates not in the tongue of his African homeland, but in the scratchy whisper of pencil on paper, in the language of lines and shading.

"I took a pencil, and I drew what I wanted to say," Akonga remembers. "This is how I started using art to communicate with people."

It is a skill the now Beijing-based 41-year-old still uses.

"I did the same thing when I moved to China in 2003," he says.

Paints and brushes have become Akonga's communication tools, along with English and Mandarin. Using art to transcend language and culture has become his profession, as well as his passion.

In November, his work was shown as part of a multi-artist exhibition in Beijing that documented through paintings, drawings and photographs the experiences of Africans living in China.

Akonga and the exhibition's organizer, Ajike "Saint Jerry" Njoku, believe strongly that art is a way for both China and Africa to see the other from different perspectives, to find common ground, and to discover and relish differences.