Huáng Yǒng Pīng was a Chinese-French contemporary artist and one of the most well known Chinese Avant-garde artists of his time. Born in Xiamen, he was recognized as the most controversial and provocative artist of the Chinese art scene of the 1980s.

Huang was one of the earliest contemporary Chinese artists to consider art as strategy. As a self-taught student, some of his earliest artistic inspirations came from Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp. He later graduated from art school in Hangzhou in 1982, and formed Xiamen Dada in 1986. Huang's oeuvre can be characterized by four periods: anti-artistic affectation, anti-self-expression, anti-art, and anti-history. At the age of 35 in 1989, Huang traveled to Paris to partake in the seminal exhibition Magiciens de la terre. He later immigrated to France and lived there ever since. As many of his pieces are very large, they are not suitable for auction.

In 1999, Huang represented France in the Venice Biennale. In 2016, his piece "Empires" was selected for the Monumenta biennial exposition at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Mamie Geneva Eisenhower was the wife of United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower and thereby First Lady of the United States from 1953 to 1961.

Mamie married Dwight Eisenhower at age 19 in 1916. The young couple moved frequently between military quarters in many postings, from Panama to the Philippines. As First Lady, she entertained a wide range of foreign dignitaries, who reacted well to her confident style and clothing choices.

Mamie Eisenhower spent her retirement and widowhood at the family farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The Russian Civil War was a multi-party civil war in the former Russian Empire immediately after the two Russian Revolutions of 1917, as many factions vied to determine Russia's political future. The two largest combatant groups were the Red Army, fighting for the Bolshevik form of socialism led by Vladimir Lenin, and the loosely allied forces known as the White Army, which included diverse interests favouring political monarchism, capitalism and alternative forms of socialism, each with democratic and anti-democratic variants. In addition, rival militant socialists notably Anarchists and Left SR’s and non-ideological Green armies fought against both the Reds and the Whites. Thirteen foreign nations intervened against the Red Army, notably the former Allied military forces from the World War with the goal of re-establishing the Eastern Front. Three foreign nations of the Central Powers had also intervened, rivaling the Allied intervention with the main goal of maintaining the territory they had received in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.