Oil on canvas

71 x 58 cm. 28 x 22 5/6 in.

Signed in Chinese, located and dated on bottom right
PROVENANCE
Acquired directly by the original Asian collector from the artist
Private Collection, Asia

The Realm of Perfection The Moment of Freedom
Li Shan – The Pioneer Chinese Avant-Garde Artists

“I have been pursuing freedom for all my life. I hope that my art is also free... If there's anything driving me (to create), then perhaps it's my insistence on looking for freedom.”
—Li Shan

Look to the Chinese contemporary art world, Li Shan has always been a maverick. As early as the 1980s, he was one of the most avant-garde figures in the 85 New Wave Movement in China. In 1993, he represented China to participate in the 45th Venice Biennale along with other artists including Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Liu Wei, Fang Lijun, and Yu Hong. Li's works aim to present the essence of life, shifting focus from human beings to animal, plant, and biological science, which results in a peculiar artistic language. Instead of employing intricate concepts and experimental techniques, he abstracted and refined the images in a spontaneous approach, unfolding a scenery apart from the real world and full of imagination.

The presented Harbin Forest (1967, Lot23) and the Jungle (1992, Lot22) are two of his early works that are rarely seen. Although both are depicting the jungle landscape, they were created 25 years apart. By comparing the two works, the artist's core vision and his constantly changing characteristics of each period can be revealed.

Harbin Forest – The Starting Point with a Lifetime Influence
Harbin Forest, which was created in the third year of Li Shan's stay in Shanghai after moving away from Heilongjiang, is one of his earliest works rarely seen in the market. The blue and black lines on the left side vertically go through the canvas and outline an ancient towering tree in northeast China; while other trees vary in height and size, creating a feeling of spatial depth. The two horses with deliberately elongated bodies walk in opposite directions and form a symmetric composition. At the same time, the central area of the picture is left blank, from where a virtual feeling of stage has emerged, showing that the artist is deeply influenced by stage design which does not only strive for reality but also bear an artistic style.

As one of the first paintings of Li Shan, this work has inspired his subsequent creation. The iconic elements such as the blue sky and the towering trees in northeast China continued in many of his representative works. The horse-shaped animal with an elongated body has also been the main subject of his several series. The mirror-image symmetric composition firstly appeared in this work has become the most distinguishable feature of Li Shan's creation, making Harbin Forest a starting point with significant influence.

Jungle – The Redemption of Freedom and Emancipation
Differentiated from Harbin Forest, there's no distinct horizon in Jungle, a work created in 1992. In the picture, the trunks appear slender; the broad and thick leaves which are typical of southern shrubbery overlap each other and cover the whole image. From the leaves to the wildflowers in the meadow, there's strong visual relation between different color fields and strokes. The delicate and refined picture has revealed the artist's ingenious pictorial arrangement, as well as a sense of alienation behind the image. In the center of the picture, an antelope and a lion-like animal lean on each other with the same posture and expression. The artist put together these two animals, which are the hunter and the hunted in the nature, picturing a surreal fairy tale world, and indicating the plundering and domestication of animal nature in urban life. The man standing on the left side with his back to the animals further suggests the separation between human and nature in the city.

The year after completing this work, Li Shan started the creation of the animal-themed Reading Series, and further delved into biological sciences, becoming the pioneer of BioArt in Chinese contemporary art world. From Jungle to BioArt, Li Shan continued to emancipate images in his unique way. Through his spontaneous artistic approach and open-mindedness, Li Shan has captured the essence of freedom and reached the acme of artistic aesthetics.

Price estimate:
HKD: 200,000 – 300,000
USD: 25,500 – 38,300

Auction Result:
HKD: --