ZHONG CHENG

Zhong Cheng 2024 Autumn Auction「Modern And Contemporary Art」

  • Zhong Cheng 2013 Spring Auction「Chinese Contemporary Art & Sculptures」
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    109

    YANG XUYUYAN (b.1910)

    Autumn Scenery

    1980

    Oil on Canvas
    72x91cm

    Signed G.K. Yog in English

    Estimate TWD 360,000-450,000
    USD 11,800-14,800
    HKD 0-0

    Hammer Price TWD 413,000
    USD 13,906
    HKD 0

With a certificate of authenticity from Yang San Lang Art Museum

Provenance：

Illustrated：

Exhibition：

Exposition：

“…Upon later reflecting on the image, he was a man who had more to say, more to share and didn't know how to make me see it without overwhelming me. Nature would have to take its course.  I would have to summon the love for art and the pioneering creative spirit that I always wanted him to believe I had.  I would have to be all these things for him, if I was going to keep his dream alive.  He didn't have that faith in his eyes that day.  I like to imagine that in his quieter moments, he thought about the possibility more optimistically. My grandmother felt his loss heavily. Throughout the years, she held vigils for him, commemorated his life and visited his mountaintop grave even after she herself became a centenarian.  There was so much she wanted to tell me as well.  Fortunately this time, I was here to listen, even after all she could do to communicate her thoughts was to hold my hand. It wasn't until I'd found love myself that I understood what it must be like to lose a life partner, what it is like to not be able to hold onto what I have in someone else tightly enough.  To know joy that is also tinged with the pain of realizing its temporary nature. How profound it must be when that love emanates from between two artists…  Souls that share a love of art, one of the pinnacles of humankind's quest to understand itself.  

 

I've heard several differing stories about how my grandparents met, including from they themselves.  Some said they were introduced by family friends.  My grandfather describes being nervous to approach her for fear of his love being unrequited.  Others however have written that it was an arranged marriage.  In the process of archiving documents and photographs in and around the museum, I have yet to find one photograph of their marriage in this otherwise well documented family. I enjoy my grandmother's story the most.  She told me they met in Paris while studying art together.  That because of their divergent cultural backgrounds, meeting and eloping in Paris was the only way they could have been together. Even if her story resonates somewhat fantastically for some, it encapsulates a deeper truth about their relationship, that they are two creative souls who could have been worlds apart and they would have still been brought together.  She wanted me to be left with the impression that their love would have come to be entirely on the merit of its divine providence, and that no other consent, circumstances or external force was relevant to their being together.  

 

Unlike my grandfather who insisted on traveling to the exact location of each of his paintings in order to capture the real "impression" that a place made upon him, my grandmother was inclined to incorporate fantasy and elements that reflected the world she wanted to see. In one of my favorite of my grandmother's paintings, one can see the statue, which has been adjacent to the museum since its dedication moved out into the garden, and buildings which long predate the statue are absent as if they don't exist.  The garden is lush, unincorporated, and a path continues on into depths unseen.  His creative spirit lives on, being a part of only those elements which brought my grandmother pleasure.  Completely oppositely yet no less validly from my grandfather's motivation to be who he was for the sake of art, my grandmother used art as her own, personal, private mode of expression. My grandfather was more inclined to externalize with art, to make others participate in his process to capture elements as they were.  If one could consider painting to be one media through which the documentarian process can be authored, then he made oil painting and the process by which he pursued truths about his subject, into a valid documentarian medium just as others have with film, photography and the like. …“

 

--- Extracted from the preface of “The Joint exhibition of Yang san Lang and His Wife” 

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