Enshrouded in a frozen landscape of atmospheric beauty, a chance encounter between an exquisite piece of Song dynasty Ru ware and the mesmeric Eisberg by Gerhard Richter begins an aesthetic and thematic dialogue between these two objects scattered across time and space. Like the surface of a great, slowly moving glacier, these two objects form a symphony of luminous blue and crackled grey across the centuries, their surfaces illuminated by anomalous ruptures and sudden changes of light.

The Ru, with its glowing, intense blue-green glaze and interlaced ‘ice crackle’ has over the course of a millennium gained mythical status as an emblem of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics. With a monolithic shard of forbidding ice at its compositional heart, Richter’s Eisberg captures the mesmeric beauty of the mist-enshrouded frozen seascape of the polar latitudes, where “A mirage-like arctic splendour towered all around, a weird, unearthly architecture of ice” (Anna Kavan, Ice, p.172).

Join us this month for the opening of Sotheby’s Maison at Landmark Chater, on 27 July – inviting all to enter Another World in the very heart of Hong Kong – and discover the resplendence of Ice: Two Masterworks on Loan from The Long Museum (27 July – 11 September).

EXHIBITION

Ice: Two Masterworks on Loan from The Long Museum

27 July–11 September 2024 | Hong Kong