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If you love Chinese Culture, Peking Opera is the art form that you must be familiar with. And you must know this name, Michael Chow(Chinese name: Zhou Yinghua), who is probably one of the most passionate Chinese about Peking Opera by interest or by fate.
Chow's father was Zhou Xinfang, one of China's most famous actors and the leading figure at the Peking Opera of his time early last century.But Chow was never able to take up his father's career as he was sent to a British boarding school when he was 12 and grew up in Europe. He studied art in London before setting out on a business career that lasted for about 50 years.
Michael Chow has been working hard and earned his name in the west as a restaurateur running a chain of high end restaurants providing authentic Chinese food in different locations around the world with the name "Chow".But Chow said deep in his heart he is an artist, and all he has been doing is to reconnect with his father and his home country China.
After 47 years of running the restaurant business, Chow restarted his painting career in recent years, and had exhibitions in various places. Voices From Other Lands found him when he is preparing his first exhibition on the Chinese Mainland in 798, an art district in Beijing. We sat down and talked for his "magnificent obsessions."
Michael Chow had ten years of professional training in painting at youth, and later focused on his restaurant business. Chow designed Mr. Chow, the first restaurant, in London featuring cool green floor tiles and white walls, and later bought art by Allen Jones, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney and Jim Dine for the walls. But Michael Chow said his restaurants have always been underlined by his desire and need to promote the Chinese culture. The passion for painting has been there and finally was turned into action.
Michael Chow continues the Qi Style that was started by his father Zhou Xinfang, a leading figure at the Peking Opera. Through years, Chow realized the Qi Style is not a performance but a method of life. By good fortune, he said after a 50-year radical sabbatical, he returned to painting in the school of Qi. And now he is a self-commissioned ambassador in promoting the great art forms in the Chinese culture, Peking Opera in particular. In doing so, it's brought him closer to his father. When it comes to the 120th celebration of his father's birth, he said he has finally fulfilled that void.
