On November 27, Distinguished University Professor Emerita Julia Andrews delivered a lecture at the Foundation Giacometti in Paris. Her talk, titled: “The Lure of the West: Chinese Modernists and Interwar Paris".

Twentieth century Chinese artists who sought to break through to a new and modern art saw Paris as the place they would find the nourishment and inspiration to accomplish this ambition.  This talk will begin by examining the careers of several idealistic artists who arrived in France from Shanghai in the early 1920s and went on to establish the National West Lake Academy of Arts in Hangzhou in 1928.  Among their lifelong aims was to create progressive art that could speak equally powerfully in East and West.  Sixty years later, with the migration of graduates from this same academy to Paris, the post-modern moment offered a similar possibility of an art unbounded by linguistic or national borders.