Exhibition illuminates Chinese artists who lived in Paris in 20th century

On May 10, 1933, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting opened at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris. It was organised by painter Xu Beihong, then a professor in Nanjing who had spent much of the 1920s travelling in Europe. More than 80 artists took part. French poet Paul Valéry (who was married to a niece of Impressionist Berthe Morisot) wrote a piece for the catalogue in which he mused that modern Chinese artists were influenced by two pasts: "theirs and ours".

You could argue that 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, was when everyone's past divided. Nationalism was on the rise: the countries that Xu took the show to after Paris (Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Soviet Union) were already accelerating towards the second conflagration of the 20th century. But the Jeu de Paume exhibition marked a coming-together and a cultural turning-point. Chinese artists had spent years gazing at the works in French museums; then the museums began to scrutinise modern Chinese artists.

"It was at that time that the French museums made their first large acquisitions of Chinese painters," says Eric Lefebvre, curator of the Chinese painting collection at the Musée Guimet in Paris. Until last year, Lefebvre was curator of the Chinese collections at the Musée Cernuschi and, in that role, he organised the major 2011 exhibition "Chinese Artists in Paris", which showcased painters who lived in the French capital between the 1920s and 1950s.

Works from that show, as well as from the Musée Guimet, the Jeu de Paume and other French institutions, are coming to Hong Kong's Museum of Art later this month for an exhibition that's part of Le French May: "Paris • Chinese Painting - Legacy of the 20th Century Chinese Masters".

"The story of Chinese artists in Paris would take a very large museum to tell," says Lefebvre. "In Hong Kong, it's the first and second chapters."

So the show (co-curated by Szeto Yuen-kit from the Museum of Art) will include works by Xu, Lin Fengmian and Pan Yuliang, all of whom arrived in Paris in the 1920s - and all of whom, incidentally, used it as a jumping-off point to live for a while in other European countries.