One thing Tibetan artist Dedron dreads is being in the spotlight. An introvert by nature, she breaks into a sweat with strangers.

However, with two on-going exhibitions on Tibet, in Rome and Milan, that end this weekend, it's difficult for her.

As one of the artists whose works are included in the exhibition, the 33-year-old was invited along with seven others to travel to Italy for face-to-face exchanges with Italian artists and museum visitors.

The soft-spoken Dedron said little in Rome, where one exhibition opened last Friday.

However, when the other opened in Milan on Monday, Dedron found she had nowhere to hide.

On the opening night, dozens of people stopped by her two paintings.

One of them features a pair of Western tourists resting on a street in Tibet, surrounded by traditional castle-like Tibetan dwellings with yak-oil lamps glowing at the windows.

Dedron makes generous use of Tibetan red - the color found on the walls of the landmark Potala Palace and on a Tibetan lama's garment - and usess simple lines.

Some visitors such as Francesca Nacci, an art student from Accademia di Brera, found the painting both inviting and teasing and started to ask about the artist. When Dedron showed up in her traditional Tibetan garment, slim and shy and with her trademark sweet smile, more gathered around her to hear her and discover what visitors later called "the magic of colors".

Dedron, who was born and raised in Lhasa, says she was not particularly sensitive to colors until much later in life, even though her parents often took her to the temples.

She first became aware of colors at the age of 9 when her parents sent her to a summer painting course.

"My limited social skills were a constant concern for my parents," recalls the artist. "My father thought it might help if I joined some interest groups such as a painting class."

While the month-long training failed to produce any results in terms of socializing, it did reveal her talent for art -a painting she made then even bagged a national award.

But she didn't find her calling in life until 13 years later. By then, a fourth-year art student in the Lhasa-based Tibetan University, Dadron visited a temple in Tibet's northeast Ngari, an area with which she was very familiar and whose culture and customs were her inspiration.

It was from these travels, Dadron says, that she discovered "the beauty of nature and of the simple life in a miraculous land filled with silent historical monuments".

"I don't think I had a strong interest in painting even then," she says. "In fact, I was depressed that I was unable to deliver what I felt for Tibet through my painting."

"It was like I had something on the tip of my tongue, but could not utter it," she says.

One day, all a sudden, while staring at the colors of the grottos in the temple, she felt like she had been struck by enlightenment.

"The combinations of different shades felt as familiar as the smell of butter tea - the traditional daily drink for us Tibetans," says Dadron. "Since then, I have always wanted my paintings to deliver that familiar flavor."

Mesmerized by the versatile use of colors in traditional Tibetan art, she spent the next two years going from one temple to another.

Over the past decade, Dedron has created her own pictorial language that is simple yet mysterious. Although it is based on traditional Tibetan art, her work is not a stylistic reproduction of that tradition. Her paintings incorporate modernist, cubist and even surrealist references. Ornamentation, design and color are essential elements of her style.

She has participated in exhibitions in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Kathmandu, Singapore and Australia, and her works can be found in the well-known Li Keran Foundation in China as well as in private collections in Britain, the United States, France and Germany.

In June this year, she held her first solo exhibition, Nearest to the Heaven, in London.

But the Tibetan artist seldom traveled outside Tibet, not even for the solo exhibition in London. Her first overseas trip was to Nepal, China's neighboring country bordering Tibet. Her limited traveling owes as much to her shyness as to her busy schedule as a painter, a volunteer at a local school for blind children and now as mother to a 7-month-old son.

"I used to teach blind children fine arts," she tells impressed museum visitors.

After a slight pause, she continues with a naughty smile: "I know you'll ask how because at first I wondered about that too. They were so pure and lovely. I simply couldn't let them down when they showed so much interest in painting.

"They asked me what is red and I took them out to the playground and told them to hold out their palms in the sun and feel how they felt. When they said they felt warm, I told them that was red. They asked me what was green, and I took them to feel the grass."

Dadron explains that she introduced colors to blind children through touch - water for blue and earth for yellow. Within months, those children, aged between 6 and 18, were able to describe music, persons and feelings with colors.

"They paint blue when they feel blue," says Dadron.

Art student Nacci is so touched that she steps forward and says to Dedron how she wishes she could become a little child again, blind just to be her student.

While Dino Cerchiai, a primary school teacher in Milan, expresses a strong desire to visit China, especially Tibet.

"I have always known China is a vast country with a variety of culture that would take much time to explore. But such an exhibition, such a conversation with you, helps brings some of the country to me," says Cerchiai. "I really hope some day I might be able to experience Tibet the way you do."

"Welcome to Tibet," says the artist, whose dread of speaking in public seems to have vanished. "I guess I would like to travel more myself."

(China Daily 10/29/2009 page20)