Oil on canvas

39.5 × 30 cm. 15 1/2 × 11 3/4 in.

Signed in Chinese and dated on bottom right; titled in Chinese and dated on the reverse stretcher
PROVENANCE
Private Collection, USA
25 May 2009, Christie's Hong Kong Spring Auction, Lot 903
Acquired directly by present private Asian collector from the above

Elegance in the Sunrise, Forever Light on the Artist's Mind
Chen Danqing's Unchanging Emotion of Tibet Theme

Tibetan Group Paintings of Chen Danqing weight heavily in his art achievement and have landmark and far-reaching significance in the history of contemporary Chinese art. During his second visit to Tibet in 1979 for half a year, he wandered through the streets of Lhasa, sketching the daily life of Tibetans. He shocked the art scene at that time with seven oil paintings on Tibetan, full of real details and sincere emotions. The work sweeps away the dogmatic theme inherited from the Cultural Revolution, which depicts the humanistic realism saturated with the self-experience of an educated generation. Tibetan Group Paintings not only establishes his artistic symbol, but also opens up the era of Chinese realistic painting with its influence.

After he moved to New York in 1982 and signed a contract with Wally Findlay Gallery to hold a solo exhibition, Chen's Tibetan-theme paintings became famous overseas. During his time in the United States, he created retrospective oil paintings based on his sketches of Tibetans from time to time. Girl in Sunrise completed in 1987 is a representative of them.

After arriving in the United States, Chen often traveled to major art museums in New York to observe Western paintings. He accumulated a wealth of visual experience and incorporated it into his own creations, presenting a new look in terms of spatial modeling and color relations. For example, in Girl in Sunrise, a Tibetan girl looks directly back at the viewers, showing a look different from those of the tall figures in the Tibetan Group Paintings. The girl in the vast world shares the same classical beauty and sacredness of Renaissance figure painting. She stands on her side and looks back, with a ray of light shone on her face, which brightens her clear eyes, the red cheeks in the sun, and the bright blue gemstone earrings on the earlobes, firmly fixing her smile. The full, gentle colors, light and shadow, truly show the moving beauty of Tibetan customs. On the one hand, Chen portrays the girl's simple and natural eyebrows with substantial and delicate brushstrokes; on the other hand, with loose block brushes, he presents the vivid and dynamic beauty in the agile interweaving. The girl's hair and her wooly Tibetan robe are flowing in the breeze. The white and light clouds spread in the blue sky. On the ground, the grassland stretches out. Everything seems to be alive, showing their charm under the dancing paintbrush. The beauty of nature and human affection flows eternally here, evoking the deepest tenderness in people's hearts in a new era.

“The appearance in 1980 of Chen Danqing series of Tibetan paintings allowed the old battleship of Chinese culture, long lost on the seas of politics, to drive near to the shores of life… It in essence ended the Cultural Revolution, and glimmers of humanity, long hoped for, started to emerge.”
——Liu Xiaodong, For Danqing

Price estimate:
HKD: 300,000 - 500,000
USD: 38,500 - 64,200

Auction Result:
HKD: 1,920,000