A French silk dress with Chinese-themed embroidery and a wallpaper featuring traditional Chinese motifs. Photos by Edmond Tang

That I shall idly paint on such cups still,

A pale slim line of blue becomes at will

A lake, in a sky of bare porcelain,

A bright crescent by white cloud overlain,

Dips its calm horn into the icy mere

And three bold strokes in green are reed-beds, near."

The lines, from the French symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme, carved a picture as delicate and subtle as its subject: Chinese porcelain.

In dim museum light, the poem on the left page of an opened book calls to mind a secret entrance leading to the charmed world of the Orient. This might have been how the audience felt when the man first read the lines to them, albeit in French, in his famous Salon for les Mardistes.

On the right page of the opened book is an etching, done by Henry Matisse, of a hand holding a brush, in the middle of applying paint to a porcelain cup. The picture, drawn with smooth and succinct lines, hinted at the same sense of nonchalance as exuded by the poem.

"Paris 1730-1930: A Taste for China", an exhibition currently being held at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, offers a tantalizing glimpse of what happened when one type of imagination is challenged and stretched by another.

The bulk of the exhibits are lent by the Musee Guimet in Paris, which specializes in works from the Asian region. The rest are contributed by a number of art institutions including the National Library of France, Center Pompidou, Louvre and Musee d'Orsay.

The show begins with the fascination of the French court with Chinese art and artifacts. In the early 18th century, objects from the Far East were the preserve of the very wealthy, and especially of the monarchy. The vases, cups and plates on display at this section of the exhibition were rigorously painted, reflecting the formal elegance befitting a court life.

Testifying to the vanity of the royalties, some of these fine China bear the "arms" (emblems) of the family whose members had commissioned the pieces.

The wind from the Orient had certainly blown into the workshops of painters who, after tapping the western mythology for centuries, had suddenly found a new source of inspiration. Chief among them was Francois Boucher (1703-1770). Despite never having set foot on the Chinese soil - and exactly because of that - Boucher painted as much from existing accounts of China as from his own imagination.

His La Foire chinoise, or The Chinese Fair, on show at the exhibition, is populated by figures with weird hairstyle that seem to have walked directly out of the pages of a Japanese manga. Neither the clothing nor the background vaguely resembles a typical Chinese bazaar of the mid-Qing Dynasty - the time when the artist lived and painted.

The lady who occupies the center of the painting is seated in a wheeled wooden contrivance with overhanging canopy, which is more likely to be the painter's own invention. All around her people are engaged either in active bargaining or in playing various tricksters. Keeping in mind that Boucher's art typically forgoes traditional innocence to portrayal scenes with a definite style of eroticism - as his religion-inspired works have strongly indicated - it is no wonder that the artist had let fantasy reign when dealing with the foreign subject.

"When two cultures come into contact, there is bound to be sparkle," said Ho Kam-chuen, chief curator of the Hong Kong Museum of Art. "And the result is invariably a combination of accuracy and fancy."

Another case in point is the costume designs for a staging of Orphelin de la Chine, or The Orphan of China, written by Voltaire (1694-1778) based on a Chinese tragedy dating back to the 13th century.

The highly imaginative costume, worn by an actor as Genghis Khan and shown through colorful illustrations at the exhibition, bears witness to the extent the ethnic fashion was reinterpreted by French costume designers, with more fanfare and flamboyance.

As Chinese aesthetics seeped into various branches of visual arts, there had been consistent experimentation to integrate it into the French way of living. A pink taffeta dress on display has the whittled waist and flared hip design typical of a lady's silhouette at the time, while the hand-embroidery on fabric features traditional Chinese themes of cranes and butterflies.

A lacquer screen that was once used as a room divider had found a new role as an expansive wall decoration. Each of its six panels, painted on both sides, was cut in the middle and then grouped together to form a continuous picture that runs across 12 panels. Given the thinness of the original panel, it amounted to a true feat to divide each of them up while keeping the pictures on both sides intact.

"They are 'French' from a material 'given' by China and 'borrowed' by the Parisian artisans," said Marie-Catherine Rey, the Chinese Collection Curator of the Musee Guimet who is the major force behind the show.

The latter half of the exhibition stars two figures - Ernest Grandidier (1833-1912) and Henry Matisse (1869-1954). The former's collection, donated to the French government in 1894, is considered the most important collection of Chinese ceramics in French history.

Examining the 40 exhibits from that collection, you could feel the sensitivity of a man who harbored genuine appreciation for the ingenuity and artistry that had gone into even the tiniest pieces, like a seal pigment box or a rectangular tray with dragon motif.

The most inspiring part of the show, nevertheless, comes at the end.

Henry Matisse, considered quintessentially avant-garde by his contemporaries, had an intimate encounter with a great artistic tradition.

Chinese artifacts from the artist's personal collection are on display at the exhibition. Some of them have also appeared in his portraits taken by photographer Helene Adant. The fact that the self-conscious man would allow himself to be pictured in the company of these objects speaks for itself.

For further proof, Matisse's charcoal and graphite studies of trees bear an unmistakable connection to the ink rendition by Chinese landscapists of an earlier era. And the color palette adopted for the abstract "Jazz" series seemed to have been directly inspired by his collection of porcelain vases in aubergine glaze. Matisse had infused his own art with a Chinese sensitivity, both as a draftsman and as a painter.

Then there's the etching, one of the 23 the artist had done for a collection of poems by Stephane Mallarme. Together, the allusive line and illustrations offer an experience that's more evocative than elucidating

Rather than expounding on the implications of cultural exchange, "my personal object is to offer a sensitive occasion to understand a taste", said the French curator.

In that aspect, the exhibition is no doubt a triumph.

(HK Edition 05/29/2008 page4)