Oil on canvas

50 × 40 cm. 19 3/4 × 15 3/4 in.

Signed in pinyin on bottom left
PROVENANCE
Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei
Acquired directly by present private Asian collector from the above

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei

Fluttering and Shining Charm of Life
Unnoticed Talent of Art World, Zhao Shou's Rare Oil Painting

“The art movement should have a heart like a nude body stripping off all the clothes, leaving everything behind and moving forward steadily and faithfully onto the path of art.”
——Zhao Shou

In 1985, Art News of China reported on a name that had been forgotten for half a century, Zhao Shou, and firstly published his work Jump in the 1930s, which combines the brutalist and surrealist styles. In the following 1990s, Zhao has been successively invited to the Guangzhou Art Museum, the National Art Museum of China, the Guangdong Art Museum, and the exhibition Five thousand years of China at the New York Guggenheim Museum, so that the whole overseas art circle also recognized the value of this unnoticed pearl in the history of modern Chinese art. In this auction, we are honoured to present Zhao Shou's Untitled, an oil painting featuring the colour of brutalism, the form of abstract expression, and the rhyme of Oriental aesthetics. It is one of the rare—less than 120 pieces—oil paintings that can be examined.

As the leader of surrealist art in the Chinese modern art history, Zhao showed his bold and perceptive vision as early as in the 1930s. Born in 1912 in Guangdong, Zhao moved east to Japan in 1933, where he studied art at the Art Department of Nihon University, Kawabata Painting School and Avant-Garde Foreign Painting Institute. When studying abroad, he was exposed to the rich Western painting trends such as Fauvism and surrealism, and since then he considered himself entering the “colourful oil painting world”. He began to promote the expansion of surrealist art in East Asia by translation and poetry. In early 1935, Zhao and his colleagues founded the Chinese Independent Fine Arts Association, striving to integrate Marc Chagall's realism, new Fauvism, surrealism and other styles to bring new blood to the Chinese art world.

Aim High and Soar in the Wind

Zhao's artistic concept is embodied in the work Untitled. Combining the free brushwork of abstract expression with the infectious palette of Fauvism, Zhao creates a geometric image with bold and powerful lines. With the dark green and yellow brush strokes spreading out layer by layer, a picture full of surrealist imagination comes up to the audience: the green leaf veins are flourishing and stretching, and the old house below are posted with festive red door couplets. Greeneries and florets in the courtyard are burgeoning, and a kite seeming like a swallow is flying over the centre, like a unique blooming flower. The work is filled with Wassily Kandinsky's gorgeous and flowery style, and also nurtures multiple possibilities of interpretation in the sense of abstract poetry. Additionally, the free and easy charm embedded in Zhao's brushwork does demonstrate the surrealist character that he advocates: “mysterious and wild disposition”. In the brushwork combining of “colour” and “rhyme”, Zhao, with blunt, strong, and vigorous oil colour, manifests the warm and brilliant parts of life. Further, he infuses a wild disposition which belongs to the intellectuals of the early 20th century into his works. The kite flying high in the picture suggests his permanent enthusiasm of “aiming high and souring in the wind”.

Price estimate:
HKD 55,000 – 80,000
USD 7,100 – 10,300