Sotheby's Hong Kong - Spring Sales 2008 Sotheby’s Hong Kong is proud to announce that its Spring Sales 2008 will be held at the Grand Hall of the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre from 8th to 11th April 2008.
Cai Guo-Qiang, another notable Chinese contemporary artist. The
museum is on Kinmen (Quemoy), a small archipelago in the Taiwan Strait controlled by Taiwan,
once the location of fierce fighting between Taiwan and the mainland. Cai invited 18 Chinese
artists from Taiwan and mainland China to exhibit their works of art in one of the bunkers, and
this present lot was one of them. Liu spent three weeks in the soldiers’ barracks on both sides
of the Strait, portraying nine soldiers from each side, and establishing their names and
nationalities despite the fact that it was difficult to distinguish one from another. Liu thus
successfully transgresses and blurs the border between mainland China and Taiwan, with the
clear message: beyond nationality and politics, all humans are the same. Liu affirms the essential
universality of humanity.
The sale also features another remarkable painting The
Forbidden City by Guo Bochuan (Kuo Po-ch’uan; 1901 –
1974) (estimate HK$30-40 million), an important Chinese
artist from Taiwan. Executed in 1946 during the artist’s stay
in Beijing well before the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China when Western aesthetics and philosophy
were more prominent, the present lot is a true rarity, a gem: one of the few paintings dealing with
this subject matter that survived the Cultural Revolution and the biggest of its kind in Guo’s
oeuvre.
Guo’s twelve years in Beijing were the most significant phase of his artistic career. Here he
combined the spirit of Chinese painting with Western painting techniques, and was greatly
influenced by his intimate friend from Beijing, Ryuzaburo Umehara, a student of Renoir. They
often went sketching together, captivated by the beauty of Chinese architecture and the
magnificence of the Forbidden City. This gradually became the inspiration behind a series of
important works featuring Beijing.
The painting is a vista from a vantage point in the renowned Jingshan Park while the strikingly
coloured roof tiles of the palace are rendered in shades of flaming red, textured by Guo’s unique
calligraphic brushstrokes. The Forbidden City is resplendent in light hues, like in an opaque
watercolour. This is a strikingly refreshing and yet traditionally majestic view of the palace. The
rhythm of the short brushstrokes is a vivid testament the influence of Chinese calligraphy, the
distinctive Chinese spirit so redolent in Guo’s art.
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SOUTHEAST ASIAN PAINTINGS SALE
Sotheby’s Hong Kong proudly announces that the Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian
Paintings Spring Sale 2008 will be held for the first time in Hong Kong to join the series of Asian
sales in the territory.** The two-session sale will offer over 180 lots featuring important works
from Indo-European Paintings, Singaporean, Malaysian, Filipino and Thai Paintings, and
Contemporary Paintings. The sale will also showcase the category’s first ever theme sale featuring
Vietnamese paintings and works of art which includes an Important Private Collection
comprising works by such celebrated artists as Le Pho, Vu Cao Dam, Mai Trung Thu, to name a
few. This eagerly-awaited inaugural sale is expected to attract much attention
