15 Highlights from Hong Kong’s Modern & Contemporary Day Auction

A head of our Modern and Contemporary Auctions on 29 and 30 March, we present 15 exceptional works to know from our Day Auction. Spanning gestural and lyrical abstraction to socialist realism, the figurative and more – these works exemplify and challenge the complex emotions of the human experience.

Chen Yifei, Golden Bridge

Chen Yifei moved to the US in 1980, returning to China to live in Shanghai in 1990. His art meanders from socialist realism to languorous glamour, uniting contemporary dynamism with classical elegance. Golden Bridge (1986) embodies what acclaimed Chinese writer Yu Qiuyu once wrote of Chen: “He found that romance of a bygone era, that tranquility of a Jiangnan afternoon, that longing for a flowing brook under a footbridge, soothing the restless eyes and souls of a generation … he’s touched the world with the beauty of China.”

Camille Claudel, Profonde Pensée or Initimité

Camille Claudel joined the workshop of renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin in circa 1894 and was one of the few leading female sculptors of her era, exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendents. She has recently achieved due prominence in the canon of art history, being featured in several films including Camille Claudel (1988), and having a dedicated museum in France, the Musée Camille Claudel. Profonde Pensée or Initimité (1898), numbered 9 of 10, portrays a woman on her knees before a fireplace. A work full of sensuality and passion, the sculpture was perceived as remarkably modern in its time.

Jiro Yoshihara, Untitled

Jiro Yoshihara co-founded the Japanese Gutai art movement in 1954, and the white circle on black of Untitled is a distinctive icon of his style. He first began to paint the circle, which simultaneously embodies completeness, closure, emptiness and harmony, in 1962. This painting was completed in 1971, the year before Yoshihara’s death, and the same year he was featured in the “Gutai” exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Rare on the market, less than 80 of Yoshihara’s paintings on canvas have ever reached auction, of which few are portray the circle.

Ju Ming, Taichi Series

This 1992 sculpture in wood places the human body in a bow-shaped, heart-opening pose, looking forward, stretching. Ju Ming is celebrated for his Tai Chi series, which showed his versatility across media, and his unique ability to capture concentrated and controlled moments of human energy and exertion. This sculpture was executed a year after his “Taichi in Wood: Ju Ming” exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.

Scott Kahn, Interior

The supine artist floats on a blue bed which is like fallen sky or a pool of water. Scott Kahn’s simultaneous depiction of himself as a physical entity and dreamer embodies art’s power to record and document and to elevate and inspire. The blue hues are an illustration of the fruitfully complementary dialogue between the American artist and the late artist Matthew Wong, notably the nocturnal blue landscapes of Wong’s final paintings.

Kazuo Shiraga, Ranmaru

Kazuo Shiraga’s crimson-hued Ranmaru embodies power and restraint. A swirl of red and orange, this is a painting that blends the Gutai artist’s uniquely dynamic urgency and vitality with composure and maturity. Ranmaru was executed in 1986, a year that saw Shiraga’s first visit to Europe, and the Centre Pompidou’s landmark “Avant Garde Arts of Japan 1910-1970” exhibition.

Lin Fengmian, Portrait of a Nun

A trailblazing modernist, teacher of Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, and Wu Guanzhong, Lin Fengmian lived in a spirit of open intellectual enquiry. The halo and symmetry of this figurative work echo centuries of the Russian icon tradition whilst being resolutely modern in its simple lines and sober colours. The ink on paper medium underscores the artist’s ability to pair Eastern aesthetics with Western influences, whilst the flower was a motif to which the artist returned repeatedly in later works.

Richard Lin, The Long and the Short

Taiwan-born Lin’s The Long and the Short (1966-68) presents balance, weight and emptiness as matters of architectural construction and precision. His sparse aesthetic offers timeless clarity and purity. This work followed his participation in documenta 3 (1964) in Kassel, Germany, a first for a Taiwanese artist.

Liu Xiaodong, Relaxing in Water

This painting is a study in repose, portraying an outer serenity which invites psychological speculation. The soft interplay of light and shadow, and the dark swimsuit framed by bright weightlessness, all contribute to delicious balance and warm poignancy. Bearing subtle echoes of Alex Katz and Lucien Freud, Relaxing in Water (1999) is Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong at his most tender and empathetic.

Liu Ye, Girl with Mondrian

Liu Ye offers a visual paradox between the primary coloured perpendiculars of Piet Mondrian, and the gently rounded curves of a child. Girl with Mondrian (2004) muses on the intersections of Chinese and western art, and the delicate harmonies, balances and collisions engendered by exposure to new cultures. The Mondrian appears face-on whilst the girl is in profile, a metaphor for understanding differing perspectives.

Georges Mathieu, Chanson Dispersée

French artist Georges Mathieu pioneered lyrical abstraction, which emphasised personal dynamism, intuition and spontaneous agency as highly as structure or form. Chanson Dispersée (1987) revels in a personal immediacy that becomes physical and organic in its weaving blood reds and twisting visceral yellows.

Tetsuya Ishida, Conquered

Tetsuya Ishida was an artist of profound psychological insight, with an ability to translate feelings of isolation and claustrophobia, societal injustices and intermittent catastrophes into powerful visual imagery. His protagonists become contemporary figures of tragedy, victims of warped priorities and irreconcilable forces. Conquered (2004) is a recognisable allegory for our fast-paced technological era, simultaneously surreal, morbid, shocking and compassionate.

Vu Cao Dam, Hortensias

Graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi in the 1930s, Vu Cao Dam emigrated to Paris, and later to the French Côte d’Azur. An excellent sculptor as well as painter, Vu Cao Dam investigated beauty, often informed by poetry and folklore, with a particular accent on flowers, women and family scenes. This painting is redolent of the Vietnamese artist’s eastern aesthetic upon which he layered French impressionist influences.

Zeng Fangzhi, Class One Series No.14

Zeng Fanzhi’s 1996 painting is a prime example of the artist’s iconic masked countenances. The mask hints at distortion and alienation, and becomes a metaphor for urban China, and a people deracinated by sweeping, unrelenting transformations and economic migration. The painting reflects both the human condition and Zeng’s own personal disorientation following his move from Wuhan to Beijing in 1993.

Fernando Zóbel, El Árbol (Homenaje a Machado)

The Harvard-educated artist moved to Spain from his birthplace in the Philippines and created a subtle visual language of suggestive abstraction which empowers freedom of interpretation. Fernando Zóbel was the subject of a major retrospective at Madrid’s Museo del Prado in 2022, titled “Zóbel. The Future of the Past”. This painting’s title translates as The Tree (Homage to Machado), referring to Brazilian abstract painter Juarez Machado.