SVG presents Independence gift to Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs

In commemoration of the 42nd Anniversary of St Vincent and the Grenadines’s Independence which was observed on Wednesday 27th October, 2021, The Embassy of St Vincent and the Grenadines in Taiwan, on Tuesday October 26, presented MOFA (Taiwan) with a mixed media painting entitled ‘Life on Daji Lu’ (2021). This 88cm by 64cm painting was created by Sean Roache, a 2019 Vincentian MOFA scholar who resides in Kaohsiung and is an Engineering student in the field of Intelligent Systems and Automatic Engineering at I-Shou University.

From left: Artist Sean Roache, Counsellor Shebby-Ann Dennie, Ambassador Andrea Bowman, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Alexander Yui, Director General in the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Ambassador Florensia Hsie and Director of Protocol (Ag)in the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs Isabel Hsu

Roache describes his painting, which is the second in a series of three, as “the union of the family and an elderly lady approaching a crossroad which symbolically represents the meeting point of different lives on our journey in this life”.

At the presentation ceremony, Vice Minister Alexander Yui, who accepted the painting on behalf of MOFA, greatly commended Roache’s discipline and dedication for being able to produce such beautiful art while attending to his studies. The Vice Minister also referred to the Embassy of St Vincent and the Grenadines as having been “the missing link” which finally took its place among the other embassies in Taiwan with its official opening on 8th August, 2019.

In her remarks, Ambassador Andrea Bowman of the Embassy of St Vincent and the Grenadines, said that the two sets of travellers “intersect at a point where a union in journeying takes place. This intersection is representative of so much, but in the context of our two countries, it symbolises the union of allied development and pathways to prosperity which our democratic countries have chosen for ourselves”. She thanked the Vice Minister for making the time to accept this gesture of art diplomacy which serves to strengthen the cross-cultural relations of the two countries.