About East West Art group
Our Mission
"Beauty is always where the Value is" and “Art as a bridge to a peaceful, beautiful world” are my belief.
The globalisation of art is certainly not a new phenomenon. From Asian silk paintings to European impressionist works, museums worldwide have always displayed artworks from different continents, loaning their best-known pieces to other museums for special exhibitions. Galleries and auction houses have always sold a wide range of artworks to many different kinds of buyers worldwide.
Our Expertise
Cultural exchange between East and West goes back many centuries. The Han dynasty saw the beginning of trade routes from China through Central Asia into the Middle East and onwards to Rome. This has become known as the “Silk Route” (thanks to the German historian Ferdinand von Richthofen, who coined the term in 1877). It is no secret that the silk and lacquerware imported from China were a symbol of power and wealth for the Romans, just as the perfumes and jewels brought from the West were for the Chinese. This exchange broadened many people’s perspective, leading to a greater tolerance towards other cultures, a cultivation of their taste for beauty and the creation of an environment conducive to the growth and development that made it possible for the Tang dynasty in the 7th century to become known as the “Golden Era”.
Between the 16 and 19th centuries, the Chinese traded with Western countries by sea, bringing Chinese ceramics, which since then have been loved and appreciated in the West.
Our Philosophy
Furthermore, from the 16th century, Chinese porcelain arrived in Europe through the maritime Silk route. The beauty of the translucent material was highly prized by Europeans; initially it was thought to be crafted from precious stone or a shell composite. The pieces were “enhanced” with silver and gold mounts, sometimes in Islamic or European shapes and styles. The appetite for porcelain grew rapidly and consequently the trade flourished. Blue and white and polychrome designs were seen as “exotic” and no effort was made to decode their message or see the qualities their creator strove to perfect. Instead, designs were commissioned to suit Western taste.
It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that European connoisseurs started to appreciate and understand the Chinese and Japanese aesthetics and taste in ceramics and porcelain.
The interaction between Western and Eastern civilisation has today reached a stage that could hardly have been imagined even fifty years ago, and the implications of this cross-fertilisation for the future are not fully understood. At a creative level, even though cultural exchanges have been intermittent and fraught with misunderstandings, they have significantly enlarged the vision of artists and of their public.
An artist’s mission is to show the world in a new perspective. The visual metaphors that an artist creates confront the viewer with the challenges that face him at a particular time. New technology is bringing cultures together. The art world is no longer constrained by location and the peace message is no longer restrained by borders or class.