The Louvre and the Forbidden City are both majestic places collecting traditional Western and Chinese arts. But is there a way to conduct a spiritual dialogue between two such utterly different streams of human civilization?

For documentary directors Xu Huan and Zhou Bing, the answer is emphatically "Yes": their large-scale documentary When the Louvre Meets the Forbidden City unveils the celebrated Louvre museum for ardent Chinese art lovers, while making comparisons between the two magnificent centers of art.

Scheduled to be aired on the CCTV documentary channel soon after Chinese New Year, the documentary is projected to "finally make dialogues between Chinese and Western cultures, through comparing artworks between the two representative art havens," according to Xu, the general director.

Divided into twelve 40-minute episodes, the documentary is the first in-depth video exploration of Chinese and Western art, exposing both the differences between the two cultures as well as the similarities they share.

It took more than two years to shoot at the Louvre, using rare collections seldom publicly shown, such as those of Renaissance art, Grecian art, Roman art, Classicism and Romanticism, the main subjects of each episode.

It is the first time that the Louvre had opened so much to a Chinese shooting crew, and also the first occasion such a bastion of European art has been so closely depicted by Chinese directors and contemporary artists.