The contributions in the edited volume discuss cultural connections between the region of Central Europe and Asia, starting from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War which reveals a great difference between developments taking place in Western Europe. Especially in the period during the Cold War. Collections such as those in Prague, East Berlin, and Budapest show how closely their activities were linked to the official cultural politics of their governments. Their common orientation towards ‘friendly’ and non-aligned nations in Asia is ultimately a sign of the general orientation of countries tied to the Eastern Bloc.
(dates unknown), was a physician, and Baoshen was among the first graduates of the Beijing Academy of Arts. She painted using Chinese as well as Western techniques, and she focused chiefly on painting flowers using the meticulous laborious brush technique, in which the contours of objects are delineated in ink outlines, which are afterwards filled in with colours. It is said she collected over two hundred types of flowers growing in Beijing and the surrounding area, and she created a painting manual using them. She was involved in several artistic societies, such as the Beiping Art Society (Beiping yishe), and some sources point to her activities in the Southern Field Painting Society (Nantian huashe). This group of painters studied the style of famous Qing dynasty painter Yun Shouping (16331690) and copied some of his brightly coloured flower compositions, which had been a style preferred by female painters in traditional China. A painting of goldfish under a magnolia twig by Lu
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Both were obviously modelled after a now lost painting by Yun Shouping, which the women copied as part of their practice. Another painting by Luo Baoshen, rarely preserved in a European collection, is Hortensia, painted in 1931 and exhibited as part of Chytils European presentations of modern Chinese painting (fig. 3).
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Vojtch Chytil taught at the Beijing Academy of Arts until 1927 and reputedly devoted enormous energy to promoting the works of his young students. Besides, 118
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Among them was Shao Xilian (18881954), a master almost forgotten today, whom Chytil met as a teacher of Chinese ink painting at this institution. Reportedly a leader of a huge group of painters who strove to revive Chinese ink painting from indigenous sources, without resorting to borrowing elements from Western art, Shao created dozens of landscapes that were part of Chytils exhibitions in Europe. Four landscapes, mostly in the archaic blueand-green style, where mountain slopes are coloured with azurite and malachite (fig. 4), and one painting of shrimps by Shao are today preserved in the NGPs collection. Another of his landscapes is part of the collection of the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asian Art in Budapest, which received it as a gift from Chytil after his exhibition there in 1930.
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