Chang Yu (San Yu) 1901-1966

Important Private Asian Collection (Lot 612-613)
Pink Lotus (Lot 612)

Rita Wong
By the mid-1990s, Sotheby's Taipei was firmly established as the primary venue for the offering of works by Sanyu.  As the person responsible for these bi-annual auctions at that time, I received numerous letters from Sanyu's friends who wished to share with us their stories.  Among them were many who offered their paintings, heretofore devoid of any monetary value, to the now growing number of enthusiastic collectors in Asia.  In 1996 I had the opportunity to meet one of Sanyu's friends, Chang Yi-an, to view her Sanyu paintings and to hear the story of their friendship.

Chang Yi-an met Sanyu in Paris in the fall of 1956 at a gathering of expatriate artists and musicians at the home of Guo Youshou, the appointed cultural officer for the Republic of China in France.  As a recipient of a J.H. Whitney Fellowship, Chang was pursuing further piano studies and performance opportunities in Europe, having just graduated from the Julliard School in New York. During the course of this trip and a subsequent one a year later under a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a second European recital tour in 1958-9, Chang developed a friendship with Sanyu, drawn together as two expatriates living in Paris, both struggling to define their lives as artists.

"He lived in the 14^th arrondissement, not far from where I was staying at the time and used to visit me," Chang recalls. "we took long walks along the boulevards and Parc Monsouris.  I could see he was an eccentric and a dreamer.  He would talk to trees; he talked about 'ping-tennis', a game he invented which he was sure would bring him a fortune.  I dared not ask how he survived meantime, but I gathered he painted walls and did carpentering."(1)  Indeed, by this time, Sanyu, almost 60 years old, was desolate and destitute.  His efforts as an artist were going nowhere, and his hopes for the success of ping-tennis were reaching a fruitless end.  Even though a few years later (in the early 60's) he would experience a final spurt of artistic energy producing some of his most symbolically powerful images, in the late 1950s, he harboured little hope and resorted, as Chang recalls, to odd jobs to survive. Nonetheless, when Chang visited Sanyu's studio and saw his paintings, she was "struck by their singularity"  She remembers, "It was obvious that every piece came from a unique vision, one at once childlike and sophisticated, playful yet profound."(2)  Chang was particularly taken by "a whimsical floral still-life, a white vase, flatly outlined against an aubergine background" (3) and even though she had never before purchased a work of art and was somewhat concerned about how she would live out the year on her modest fellowship, she was determined to own it.  Sanyu was quite happy to make the sale and gave her another smaller painting of goldfish as a token of his appreciation.

One of the more poignant memories Chang Yi-an has of her friendship with Sanyu was New Year's Eve 1958.  They spent the evening at Cafe Dome watching passers-by from the heated terrace.  As displaced expatriates, they were both somewhat depressed.  Chang, a budding musician had a then uncertain, but eventually promising life ahead; Sanyu, on the other hand, was a middle-aged man whose hopes appeared to be fading with each passing day.  His paintings remained unsold and no one was terribly interested in his ping-tennis. His life would end, prematurely, a mere eight years later.[4]  That was the last time Chang saw Sanyu.

Shortly after Sanyu's death in 1966, Chang, who was already back in New York and married, was notified that he had left her two paintings.  When they were delivered to her home in New York, she was surprised and moved that he had remembered her.  One was a painting of a Pekinese Dog on a Chair(5) and the other was the Pink Lotus.(lot 612)  Chang was enchanted by the lotus painting, "It was so typical a Sanyu, the restrained and delicate innocence of the flower stems, their stylized composition brought to me the impact of a man who absorbed the essence of the East and the West and made it his own."(6)

In Sanyu's oeuvres, there are three paintings of lotus growing from jardinieres.  The first, dated 1934, was formerly from the Johan Franco collection and is the smallest of the three-an intimate painting with a tightly composed lotus plant shown against a black ground, typical of this period.[7]  The second, Pink Lotus given to Chang, painted in the 1940s, is freer in spirit and informed more by spontaneous calligraphic brushstrokes.  Painted during the artist’s final period, the third, now in the collection of the National Museum of History in Taiwan, considers the more formal aspects of the flowering plant with the stems solidly portrayed and the blossoms and leaves in a more realistic juxtaposition.[8]  Many symbolic explanations and parallels to Sanyu's life can be culled from these paintings- the first timid, but hopeful, the second expressing the randomness of a lonely and fleeting existence and the third, a reconciliation. In the catalogue raisonne of Sanyu's oil paintings, I divided Sanyu's oeuvres into three main categories:  nudes, still lifes and animal/landscapes.  Of the nearly 130 still lifes recorded, the vast majority (over 90%) are of flowers, and of these, half are of cut flowers in vases and half of potted flowering plants.  There are four paintings of lotus in vases[9] and the three above-mentioned lotus growing from pots.  For the former, Sanyu arranged the long stems of the cut lotus in proportionately tall vases, offering a sense of balance and ease.  Ironically, the impact of the living lotus, straining upwards in an awkwardly small pot with scant soil, is far less visually comforting than the cut lotus, deprived of their life-giving roots.  The allusion to Sanyu's increasingly destitute life is painfully apparent in that the living plants rather than the cut ones exude a sense of despair and hopelessness.

Pink Lotus, a gift from Sanyu to a friend with whom he shared moments of camaraderie and of loneliness, captures a sadly poignant moment in his life during which he reveals not only a sense of longing for his native China, represented by the lotus, but also of his desolation.  Although this period was followed by his final creative outburst, few of those paintings would express the freedom and disregard, the strength and the beauty of Pink Lotus.

(1) Chang Yi-an, “Remembering Sanyu? written statement, undated.(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.  See Rita Wong, SANYU Catalogue Raisonn?Oil Paintings (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), no 101, p 211
(4) In 1966 Sanyu died of accidental gas asphyxiation in his studio in Paris at the age of 65.
(5) Wong, no 185, p 304
(6) Chang , Ibid. 
(7) Wong No. 172, p. 289
(8) Wong No. 174, p.291
(9) Wong, no 106-9, pp. 216-9