Gu Tongxiang preferred to paint in the courtyard.
Gu's Painting and Calligraphy Gallery is now a small art gallery decorated with classical music and finely decorated, like a little museum.
In fact, the main selling point is its elegant and exquisite appearance.
It's designed for doing business with bourgeois customers.
Across modern galleries and luxury cafes in Yangon, the main target audience is foreign tourists and well-off urban middle class.
In the past, when times were tough, this was not even an option.
Going back thirty or forty years, back then in Myanmar, painting Chinese paintings was like performing crosstalk or folk theater, if you really held onto a literati's airs, you'd starve to death.
One had to be grounded.
Every day people would carry folding tables and chairs, writing materials, and find a crowded place like an overpass or park to set up a stall and paint on the spot.
Paint, then shout, shout, then paint again.
