Qiu Shihua - Contemporary Art Part II New York Friday, May 18, 2007 | Phillips

Create your first list.

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

  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Catalogue Essay

    Qiu Shihua was born in Sichuan in 1940. During the Cultural Revolution he
    was assigned to paint large-scale billboards, and upon visiting France in the
    1980s he was heavily drawn to Impressionist painting. His unique style of
    landscape painting developed under the styles of these two disparate
    influences, combining elements of Impressionist technique with the Chinese
    concept of landscape painting as spiritual expression rather than physical
    representation. The resultant canvases are landscapes of the mind itself
    that undergo subtle but captivating modulations as the viewer beholds
    them through varying moods, emotion, light, and time.

    “The landscape reveals itself gradually to the concentrated and patient
    viewer: cliffs, water, woodland. Like classical Chinese landscapes, Qiu
    Shihua’s pictures are exempt from the laws of central perspective. There is
    no recognizable center, neither a horizontal nor a vertical axis, no left or
    right, perhaps not even an up and a down…‘For me north, south, east or
    west count for nothing, nor do red, yellow, or blue, and certainly nor past,
    present, and future. With endless emptiness in the heart there is neither
    coming nor going; they are one and the same. So are my works too: simple
    and pale, calm and empty. All being and non-being is hidden in them,
    completely self-contained. In the zero condition the original countenance of
    the soul reveals itself.’” (B. Fibicher, Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art
    from the Sigg Collection, Ostfildern, 2005, p. 240).

229

Untitled

2005
Oil on canvas.
60 1/2 x 106 in. (153.7 x 269.2 cm).
Signed in Chinese characters along the right edge.

Estimate
$70,000 - 90,000 

Contemporary Art Part II

18 May 2007
10am & 2pm New York