Watering the gardens of friendship

Exhibition in Versailles and other European venues shows how civilization benefits from creativity and imagination, Zheng Zheng reports in Shanghai.

The grandiose Versailles Palace is a place etched in history, and its ornate grounds were the perfect setting for Wandering in the Gardens of Jiangnan, an exhibition that attracted throngs of people in the hope of glimpsing what results when Eastern design meets Western style.

The exhibition, which took place last week in Paris, and which is set to run in Germany and other countries later, interprets the mutual appreciation between civilizations by re-creating the splendor of traditional Chinese gardens in historic European settings.

Chinese gardens are not merely beautiful spaces, but reflections of spiritual and cultural ideals, explains Zhang Ming, 55, curator of the exhibition and director of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Shanghai's Tongji University.