Collage，mixed media on paper

55 x 75 cm.21 5/8 x 29 1/2 in.

Signed in Chinese and English on lower right
Liang Quan
(b.1948-)
Before the lightsome and empty “Liang Quan style” we familiar with, his creations had gone through a colorful stage of “location management”. In terms of time the creations of this stage can be roughly defined as beginning in 1985 and ended in 2000, and according to style and characteristics of works, this stage can be summarized as “heavy color period”. Afterward, Liang Quan’s creations have been gradually shifting from full and dense to ethereal.

In the examination of Liang Quan’s creations in “heavy color period”, basically we can see the influences of Western art school training, as well as the then Abstract Expressionism and German Neo-Expressionism on him. As an oriental artist, Liang Quan creates his works out of the understanding and fascination about Western arts, he uses the idea against conventions accepted through common practice of Postmodernism itself to turn his vision toward himself, and digs into the rich inside of traditional Chinese aesthetics, not to rigidly contradict, exclude and confront, instead, he diverts, recruits, uses and transforms it, and then re-endow it semantics with a huge difference. While participating in Western Postmodernism movement, in the creation of works Liang Quan generated awareness of looking for nutrition from Chinese traditions, making him become a forward-looking artist tracing sources from Chinese arts in new ware period.

In the period from 1985 to 2000, Liang Quan created a lot of heavy color works, mainly completed with rice paper collage and supplemented by hand-painting. The dual inheritance of Chinese and Western traditions and the intertextual rhetoric had become the key to creation of Liang Quan in “heavy color period”. In this work, “Untitled”, we see that Western color composition and Chinese imagery were placed in parallel on picture, and some residual pieces of traditional painting and calligraphy, graffiti-style symbols and lines, and even traces of burnt, were superimposed together with dyed rice paper. Ostensibly, what expressed by Liang Quan seems to be a hustle and strife space on paper, anger and catharsis, and rational and expecting contradictory emotions suffuse in the picture, this, in fact, can be said a mere coincidence with the “suddenly and wildly prevailing” rebellious spirit as well as the social common crisis mentality in the eighties and nineties of the last century, just as he himself puts it: “In the content of my work, although a lot of splitting spaces filled with hustle, chaos, desires and disputes lurk, but I would like to constrain them with some symbolic notations. People always need rationality, and only right rationality can bring us culture and elegance.”

Price estimate:
HKD：100,000 - 200,000
USD：12,900 - 25,800

Auction Result:
HKD: 322,000