1.10. – 16.11. 2025 Jiří Straka: Where the West Ends, Where the East Begins

A profile exhibition featuring paintings and painted porcelains by the artist Jiří Straka, who employs traditional Chinese art techniques for his contemporary “Western” themes, is currently on display at Villa Pellé. Using large-format ink paintings on rice paper or cobalt paintings on porcelain, Straka crafts a captivating and highly aesthetic transcultural vision that shifts art models across media and centuries.

Jiří Straka is an artist who bridges the West and East. His work explores cross-cultural interactions, their mutual recognition, and blending, without emphasising or claiming the superiority of one cultural environment over another; instead, it demonstrates a two-way and natural enrichment while maintaining the unique aspects of different cultures. Art may not save the world, but it can provide insight to both the powerful and powerless on how to live and survive on our diverse planet.

Born in Prague in 1967, Jiří Straka studied Sinology at Charles University in Prague from 1989 to 1995. Afterwards, he spent 1995–1996 at the Studio of Traditional Ink Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, fulfilling his desire to professionally master this unique painting technique and honour his secondary school nickname Qi Baishi, inspired by the most renowned and distinctive Chinese ink painter of the first half of the 20th century. The essence of his ordinary themes and civil sensitivity is reflected in Straka’s paintings, capturing not only contemporary China but also motifs from the Giant Mountains and their foothills. If ink painting has developed over centuries within the Chinese cultural environment and follows clear rules that have been passed down through generations, Jiří Straka surprisingly enriches it by merging it with real life, observed from below, in quiet and trivial situations, through the perspective of a Western artist. However, he integrates with the Chinese present to such a degree that he becomes a genuine part of both cultural spheres. With the architectural collaboration of Jiří Příhoda, the exhibition summarises the selection of earlier and contemporary works in a concept that includes all Straka’s important themes, including his porcelain retrospective.

Jiří Straka grew up in Roztoky u Jilemnice, a town situated at the foot of the Giant Mountains, and often returns there, although he frequently stays in Beijing, where he runs the Czech China Contemporary Gallery along with his wife A Qin, who is also a painter. He also spends time in other Chinese destinations and, of course, in Prague.

Alongside the exhibition, a catalogue was published, compiled by Martin Dostál, Ondřej Doležal, and Jiří Straka. The graphic design was created by Ondřej Doležal and the Brno studio pixel-e. The publication was released by Villa Pellé in collaboration with the Kant Publishing House, Prague.

Curator: Martin Dostál