Layers of Light and Detail
With its gilded mirrors, painted panels, and soft light, the Green Salon is one of Schloss Leopoldskron’s most ornate spaces.
Commissioned by Max Reinhardt in the 1920s, the room’s hand-painted panels draw from the French rococo tradition of “chinoiserie,” an 18th-century European fantasy of East Asian art and culture.
Though designed as theatrical set pieces, the room evokes centuries of cross-cultural fascination, global trade, and evolving ideas of taste and status in the 1920s.
Cultural Appreciation or Appropriation?
The chinoiserie style found here—once a symbol of aristocratic worldliness—continues to raise questions today.
Was it appreciation or appropriation? While some view chinoiserie as a colonial fantasy that flattens and exoticizes “the East,” others see it as a marker of early transcultural exchange and admiration.
Reinhardt’s version was shaped by both rococo art history and the cinematic trends of his era, blurring the line between homage and illusion.
Kuan Yin: A Figure of Compassion and Transformation
In this room, three statues of Kuan Yin—the Buddhist deity of compassion—offer quiet presence.
Originally male in Indian tradition, Kuan Yin evolved over centuries into a deeply feminine figure across East Asia, while also being depicted as asexual or androgynous.
Today, Kuan Yin is embraced by many transgender and nonbinary activists as a symbol of care beyond fixed identities. Her presence here was honored during the 2013 session of the Salzburg Global LGBT* Forum, where a poem was performed in her name.
*LGBT: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. We are using this term as it is widely used in human rights conversations on sexual orientation and gender identity. We wish it to be read as inclusive of other cultural concepts, to express sexuality and gender, intersex, and gender non-conforming identities.