In 1938, while fleeing the invading Japanese troops, two students of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, parted ways.

The institution was then called the National School of Fine Arts.

The students met again in Paris in 1987, when the late Yan Han, a noted printmaker at the time, was showing his works in the French capital where his former classmate Chu Teh-chun, a well-known abstract painter, lived.