New Zealand filmmaker and artist Vincent Ward has an award-winning portfolio created from "carving" a place in different cultures, but in China his work has gone ahead to carve a place for him.

Best known abroad for directing the Oscar-winning 1998 feature, What Dreams May Come, and as a producer on The Last Samurai, Ward has delved back into his artistic roots in his latest venture.

Breath: The Fleeting Intensity of Life is a multimedia exhibition that captures the themes of displacement and vulnerability.

Consisting of a multi-screen cinematic installation and long, narrow paintings and photographs, Breath had a successful debut at what is arguably New Zealand's most adventurous major contemporary art venue, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, in New Plymouth.

The self-described "gypsy filmmaker" returned to Auckland to create Breath after a career that has taken him into the heart of New Zealand's indigenous Maori society and on to Hollywood, New York and remote locations, such as the Canadian Arctic, where he lived with the Inuit while making 1993's Map of the Human Heart.

Breath is already drawing international attention, notably from China.

"During the Govett-Brewster exhibition, we had a professor of art from the Shanghai Institute of Design of the Chinese Academy of Art come to see the work," Ward said. "She flew in from Shanghai and is very keen on bringing the show to Shanghai with a large exhibition next year. She and her university want to bring me across to lecture on new media, as well as exhibit."

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