Exhibition puts Sino-French artistic partnership in the frame

France has a special meaning for modern Chinese art.

In the first half of the 20th century, the European country, almost a byword for artistic endeavor, was the destination for young Chinese artists who aspired to brush up, literally, their techniques and broaden their visions of art. Many of them attended renowned institutions, including the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and the Academy de la Grand Chaumiere.

And they returned home to refresh the outlook of Chinese art at the time. For decades afterwards and until the present day, their influence is evident in the work of artists covering several generations.

To mark this important historic connection between Chinese and French art circles, the National Art Museum of China, which houses a considerable collection of French art, presents the Heritage Immortal exhibition until Sunday. Paintings, prints, sculptures and mixed-media works by members of the French Academy of Fine Arts, Institut de France, are on display.

Wu Weishan, director of the National Art Museum, says the exhibition centers on how featured artists, nurtured by the rich soil of French culture, keep pushing forward the boundary of art.

"It hails the sincerity and friendship of a scholarly community, of which the members impart in their work the utmost humanity, warmth and love," says Wu who is also a correspondent member of the French Academy of Fine Arts.

Didier Bernheim, a sculptor and featured artist, says the exhibition is derived from a reference to the French Academy of Fine Arts' members as "persons of immortality" in France, and being added to the assemblage of the National Art Museum will make these works "immortal" on a different continent.

Since 2016, the National Art Museum has held three exhibitions dedicated to the creation of French Academy of Fine Arts' members, including the current one.

The museum has also mounted solo exhibitions for several members, including Chu Teh-chun, the late abstract painter who was elected in 1997 to become the first member of Chinese ethnicity at the French Academy, and late master painter Wu Guanzhong, a correspondent member and Chu's schoolmate while studying at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

Another member and esteemed photographer Bruno Barbey, who died on Nov 9, also held a one-man exhibition at the National Art Museum last year titled The True Color of China. On show were a dozen of photos which the Paris-based photographer has taken in China from the early 1970s till today.

Especially, Barbey documented the historical course and vivid life moments of China during his visits first in 1973 and then back in 1980. His photos captured with colored Kodak films, at the time still uncommon, introduced to the world the dramatic transformation of a traditional civilization to a modern version four decades ago.

Barbey once said,"Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.

"Back in the 1970s and '80s, most pictures of China were taken in black and white. Few great photographers came to China from France. There were not so many documentations of China in color in the '70s."

He donated a selection of these old snapshots to the National Art Museum and some of them are also on show, evoking a strong sense of nostalgia among the home audience.

The current exhibition shows sculptures by Jean Cardot, a member who died in October.

Cardot made three landmark sculptures installed on Parisian streets: Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Thomas Jefferson. He made several donations to include 11 works to the National Art Museum, and one of them, Bull Under the Sun, which he created in 1968, is situated at the museum's outdoor area.