Hsiao Chin - 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale Hong Kong Saturday, November 26, 2016 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Studio Marconi, Milan
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    Born in Shanghai in 1935, Hsiao Chin and his family moved to Taiwan in 1949, the year of the Chinese revolution. He grew up in an artistic environment as his father, Hsiao Yo-Mei, was an accomplished Chinese conductor and composer who founded the National Conservatory in Shanghai. Hsiao pursued drawing and painting at the National Taiwan Normal University where he studied briefly under Chu Teh-chun and Li Chung-shen, both important figures in the development of modern Chinese painting. During his time in Taiwan, Hsiao helped to found Ton Fan Group, the first group of Chinese painters to promote Chinese Abstract Art as a movement, which led to the flourishing of modern art in Taiwan.

    In 1956, Hsiao received a scholarship from the Spanish Government and took up art in Barcelona. While in Spain, Hsiao became friends with several artists who founded the “Informalism” group, including Antoni Tàpies and Manolo Millares. In 1959, Hsiao Chin moved to Milan and later created Punto Art Movement together with several Italian and Japanese artists, including Antonio Calderara and Kengiro Azuma. In Milan, he met the dealer Giorgio Marconi with whom he entered into long term collaboration, leading to some of his most fruitful periods of artistic expression.

    Hsiao’s primary goal was to search for a universal language in art. His interest in Taoist philosophy, leads to his concern with the duality principle, the balance between yin and yang, as well as principles such as simplicity, purity and nothingness. These became the fundamentals in Hsiao’s artistic creations. Furthermore, for Hsiao, paintings are a record of the mind of the painter at a certain space and time, and are visual records of his inner state in which he tries to be in accord with. Created in 1965, the present lot is characteristic of Hsiao’s artistic creations in Milan in the 1960s. It was also around this period that Hsiao engaged himself in hard-edge paintings characterised by striking parallel coloured strips, creating a world of dynamic tension. The zig-zag shapes in orange and blacks in the present lot signifies electric currents or charges of energy, and the two round eye-like circles with radiating concentric circles allude to opposing and complementary forces of life, or perhaps to the sun and moon. The overall effect is a striking abstract work with imagery and colours that pulsate throughout the canvas, symbolising the vibrations of the cosmic force, to convey an expansive universe and spirituality, deeply rooted in Eastern traditions.

40

Nel profondo delle Tenebre

1965
signed and dated 'Hsiao Chin 1965. [in English and Chinese]' lower centre
acrylic on canvas
135 x 165 cm (53 1/8 x 64 7/8 in.)
Painted in 1965.

Estimate
HK$400,000 - 600,000 
€48,200-72,200
$51,300-76,900

Sold for HK$475,000

Contact Specialist
Jonathan Crockett
Deputy Chairman, Asia and Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Asia
+852 2318 2023

Sandy Ma
Specialist, Head of Evening Sale
+852 2318 2025

General Enquiries
+852 2318 2000

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale

Hong Kong Auction 27 November 2016