Playing with Toad

For the better part of a century, Professor Asit Kumar Biswas has been one of the world’s leading experts on water management and environmental protection. Remarkable and distinguished, Prof. Biswas’ career counts various professorships in the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden and Singapore, numerous authorships of books and scientific papers, as well as multifarious leadership positions in international organisations, including a member of the World Commission on Water. As a pioneer in his field, Prof. Biswas is the founder of the International Water Resources Association, the World Water Council, the Third World Centre for Water Management, and the International Journal of Water Resources and Development. To this day, his expertise and commitment to environmental conservation result in his role as an indispensable adviser to many United Nations agencies, governments and major institutions.

In 1980, at Deng Xiaoping’s invitation, Prof. Biswas travelled to China to provide counsel on the South-North Water Transfer Project; there, he became acquainted with Qu Geping (b. 1930), China’s first chief of environmental protection. As it happens, apart from formerly assuming the roles of Director of the State Environmental Protection Agency and Chairman of the National People’s Congress Environment and Resources Conservation Committee, Qu was also a defender of the arts who maintained enduring friendships with prominent Chinese artists. So, upon learning that not only do they share a desire to reform environmental policies, but also an interest in art, Qu introduced Prof. Biswas to exceptional and recherché Chinese paintings over time.

Since their meeting forty years ago, Prof. Biswas and Qu Geping have collaborated on several publications and respectively built impressive collections of Chinese art. While many artists have gifted Qu their paintings as tokens of appreciation, thereby enlarging his assemblage, Prof. Biswas’ Chinese art collection has also grown on account of Qu’s such connections and recommendations. On that account, while the Chinese paintings from Professor Asit K. Biswas’ collection distinctly serve as testaments to his fine artistic taste, they also represent a treasured friendship between two of the world’s most influential environmentalists.