Beijing art museum holds Luo Bonian's retrospective

Born into an official's family in Hangzhou, Luo was deeply influenced by traditional Chinese culture from a young age. The early 20th century saw an influx of Western culture in which photography was hailed as an expressive art form. A young banker with a love for new culture, Luo developed a passion for photography, a fashionable and expensive hobby at the time.

Over the years of his exploration, the self-taught photographer integrated Pictorialism (an international aesthetic movement during the later 19th and early 20th centuries that sought to highlight the artistic possibilities of photography and argue that it was a fine art equal to painting, sculpture, and other traditional mediums) with avant-garde elements of Western modernism.

Luo's experimentation resulted in a unique personal artistic language that not only infused new

vitality into the photography of the Republic of China era, but also helped advance the development of Chinese photographic history, art critics said.