Acrylic on canvas

88 x 68 cm.34 2/3 x 26 7/9 in.

Signed in Chinese and English, dated on bottom right
PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Asia

The Boundless Inner World of Hsiao Chin

Hsiao Chin was born into a musical dynasty in 1935. In 1949, he and his uncle-in-law fled from the turmoil of the mainland to live in Taiwan. Later, he studied art with the father of modern art in Taiwan, Li Chun-Shan and, in 1955, teamed up with artists such as Li Yuan-Chia and Hsia Yang to found the Ton Fang Art Group. That same year, he obtained a grant from the Spanish government to study in Spain and subsequently traveled to other nations in Europe to further hone his skills. In 1985, he was granted tenure at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where he teaches and creates to this day. His artworks have been collected by a number of institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as well as the Taipei National Museum of History and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The works currently up for auction, Untitled (Lot 120) and Empty Realm (Lot 121), are two of the artist's most acclaimed works from his time as a student in Italy during the 1960s and 70s.

The Rhythm and Rhyme of the Earth
The large expanses of white in Untitled provide space for the work to breathe. In the upper center of the canvas, an irregular form in bright red floats downward like the glow of a sunset; together, this shape and the deep-blue hemisphere at the bottom of the canvas convey a powerful sense of liveliness and movement. In Untitled, Hsiao Chin uses a minimal color palette to create a complementary relation between the vermillion and blue. Through these two colors alone in combination with the powerful composition of his work, he is able to convey contrasting notions such as coolness and warmth as well as day and night. His work suggests that human emotions rise and fall like the tide and vividly evokes life's vicissitudes.

Self-Refinement Through Inaction
When creating the work Empty Realm in 1977, the artist was greatly inspired by Japanese Zen Buddhist painters such as Kiban Sangai. Hsiao only depicts three basic shapes — a circle, a triangle, and an oblong — leaving the rest of the canvas entirely blank. These three shapes symbolize the three stages of life: germination, growth, and death. Given his age and the breadth of his life experience, the artist had by this point already assimilated much of the wisdom that the world around him had to offer. In this work, he describes the process of continual self-refinement and improvement.

Price estimate:
HKD: 160,000 – 260,000
USD: 20,400 – 33,200

Auction Result:
HKD: 200,600