yesterday I finally succeeded to visit the exhibition "Betörend schön" - Beguiling beauty" Chinese reverse glass paintings from the Mei-Lin Collection" in the grand old Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich.
Reverse glass painting was adopted from Europe to China in the 18th century.
Specialised studios painted on the back of glass or mirrors - and the colours become especially bright and radiant.
"So-called 'shinü hua' (...) are among the established themes of Chinese painting and often associated with seduction and the world of the courtesans" - write the curators of the exhibition and ask themselves - and us - "What makes a woman beautiful?" - and answer evasively with "Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder". You bet.
Shown are 70 works from the Mei - Lin Collection (Rupprecht Mayer and his wife Haitang Mayer-Liem - they hunted them in antique shops and on flea markets in Peking (Beijing) in the 80's.
I loved the exhibition. Well represented, completed with gowns and shoes etc.
Well, well, well: the shoes... In my home city Bremen, where the "Übersee- Museum" displayed all the treasures that captains and rich merchants had brought home from Africa and all the world (I wonder how they deal with those treasures nowadays), I saw those tiny shoes and shuddered... the feet of the poor women were bounded from earliest youth to keep them crippled.
Those women (even in the 19th century it was done!) could not walk on those feet, size of a baby foot - they were transported in litters, and men thought it very sexy and the forced gait of it, so I read in a novel, were good for circulation - everywhere...
And I saw those very very long nails of all the depicted women (shuddering again - yet I see them nowadays too when I travel by train - on young women!)
One meaning, of course, is: "I don't have to work". Another ... a special group of men will be able to work that out in a second.
