Wang Yidong

Hong Kong, Schoeni Art Gallery
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1993

Hong Kong, Schoeni Art Gallery, Oil Paintings by Wang Yidong, 1993

Contemporary Chinese Artists Oil Painting Albums – Oil Painting Art of Wang Yidong,  Tianjing, China, Yang Liu Qing Fine Arts Press, 2000, p.33

This work is overall in very good condition. There is no sign of restoration under UV light examination.
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An Exploration of Eternal Beauty

The Bride (Lot 1026) has a double significance in Wang Yidong’s career. In 1987, he became a visiting scholar at Oklahoma City University on its invitation. After a period of focused research on contemporary Western art, he realised that China was ultimately the wellspring of his artistic ideas, and in 1988 he returned to his birthplace of Shandong, where he developed a distinctive personal style based on the brides of the area around the Yimeng Mountains. On the other hand, in the 1990’s Wang Yidong became acquainted with Manfred Schoeni, a shrewd art dealer and curator from Switzerland with a passion for Chinese culture. In 1993, Schoeni founded the Schoeni Art Gallery in Hong Kong, which became an important platform for the international exposure of realist Chinese painting, and Wang Yidong was one of the most important artists in his roster from the beginning. During their decade-long collaboration, Schoeni artists exhibited in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Taiwan, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and other locations, developing an international following of collectors in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The Bride was not only the earliest painting in Wang Yidong’s series of Yimeng brides but also the highlight of his first solo exhibition at Schoeni Art Gallery, where Bride was collected. Appearing on the market for the first time in the two decades since then, Bride presents a life-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Wang Yidong was very well-versed in Western realist painting. While embodying the essence of Western classical art, his paintings are infused with the characteristics of Chinese culture in their themes and in their visual details. Zhang Rui, Professor at the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University, wrote, ‘The Bride and Wedding series of the 1990’s embodied Wang Yidong’s new insights into classical oil paintings… In many works in The Bride series, the protagonist is seated facing the viewer frontally. This mirror-like composition blurs the boundary between reality and the painted scene, and draws the viewer into the latter. The emergence of this technique several centuries ago, during the Renaissance, enabled Western portraiture to capture a sitter’s personality and spirit as opposed to a superficial observable reality. In Wang Yidong’s The Bride, a bride in red is seated in a dark enclosed space and stares ahead, as if into aspirations and hopes for the future. Her posture is elegant, almost solemn, and her clothing forms a stark contrast with the black and blank background. This contrast expresses a Chinese aesthetics of simplicity, purity, and introverted beauty, which is further echoed by the techniques of traditional decorative gongbi painting employed in the rendition of the background.’

Born in the 1950’s, Wang Yidong experienced the tumultuous early decades of the People’s Republic. But unlike many of his peers, he never approached the currents of Scar Art that were the mainstream in the 1980’s, and instead maintained an optimistic and affirmative attitude towards life in all its emotional texture. His figures exude warmth and simple contentment. The artist himself has said, ‘When [I] created The Bride, I purposely placed the protagonist in the middle and filled the composition with her. Her body and clothing alike have a centrifugal expansiveness that is eye-catching and rich in texture.’ The bride’s posture accords with the traditional Chinese aesthetic preference for centeredness and symmetry; she is elegant and admirable even if she is a poor peasant’s bride. Wang Yidong’s figural representation is starkly different from the classical proportions and three-quarter views of Western portraiture. Similarly, classical Western chiaroscuro uses external light to articulate a figure’s facial features and the contours of his or her body, whereas Wang Yidong uses instead flat illumination, which softens the figure and makes her more approachable. This use of light in fact can be traced to Qing-dynasty court portraiture. As Nie Chongzheng, Researcher at the Palace Museum, has pointed out, the Italian Jesuit missionary Giuseppe Castligione (1688-1766) adjusted Western chiaroscuro in his imperial portraits to illuminate sitters’ faces frontally instead of sideward. He also added subtle shadows on and around the nose and on the neck to create a sense of volume. In the phoenix and peony patterns on the bride’s bed, Wang Yidong refers also to Song-dynasty bird-and-flower painting, which he loves. Western realism and Chinese gongbi here achieve an organic union, reflecting the enduring influence of artist’s experience abroad and his deep and longstanding engagement with both Chinese and Western painting traditions.