Chow Chung-cheng was a Chinese-German sinologist, painter and writer. She came from an old Chinese family of civil servants and scholars. At the age of 15, she left home against her parents' wishes, attended a lyceum and began university studies in Beijing, which she later continued in Paris. In 1935, she became the first Chinese woman to receive a doctorate from the Sorbonne on a political science topic. She then worked as a lecturer in sinology at Leiden University. After the end of the Second World War, she headed a Chinese school in Berlin. In her second marriage she was married to the German diplomat Georg von Koeppen, with whom she lived in Bonn from 1956.
From 1950 to 1954, she completed her artistic training in painting at the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg with Alfred Mahlau and in Stuttgart with Willi Baumeister. As a visual artist she was active in the fields of oil painting, watercolour and graphic art. In addition, she published a series of books for children and young people in German from 1957 onwards, in which she mainly dealt with themes from her Chinese homeland.
The present work was presumably acquired by the museum in the course of a solo exhibition held in 1965 (cf. exhibition catalogue Chow Chung Cheng, Frankfurt/Main: Museum für Kunsthandwerk, 1965).