Tianyi is a painter whose life coincides with perhaps the most turbulent era in China's vast history, from the Sino-Japanese War through the end of the Cultural Revolution. Raised in a world whose ageless traditions were on an irreversible collision course with modernity and the West, Tianyi is seduced by the 'otherness' of Western, and specifically European, cultures through exposure to their art, music and literature. Tianyi heads to Paris on a painting scholarship; it is April 1948, he is 23 years old. His nine-year stay in Europe as an indigent student and artist is dominated, as is the case for any visitor in a foreign land, at once by his discovery and his embodiment of the 'other.' A letter from his ex-lover Yumei calls Tianyi back to his homeland.
Tianyi is a painter whose life coincides with perhaps the most turbulent era in China's vast history, from the Sino-Japanese War through the end of the Cultural Revolution. Raised in a world whose ageless traditions were on an irreversible collision course with modernity and the West, Tianyi is seduced by the 'otherness' of Western, and specifically European, cultures through exposure to their art, music and literature. Tianyi heads to Paris on a painting scholarship; it is April 1948, he is 23 years old. His nine-year stay in Europe as an indigent student and artist is dominated, as is the case for any visitor in a foreign land, at once by his discovery and his embodiment of the 'other.' A letter from his ex-lover Yumei calls Tianyi back to his homeland.
