An “ordinary” Chinese vase put up for auction in France and valued at €2,000 (£1,745) has sold for almost €8m after a ferocious bidding war among buyers convinced it was a rare 18th-century artefact. At the sale in Fontainebleau near Paris, auctioneers were astonished as the offers from about 30 mainly Chinese bidders kept on coming. When the hammer fell the vase had been sold for €7.7m – almost 4,000 times its estimated value. With the seller’s fees, the final purchase price was €9.12m. The tianqiuping-style porcelain was put in…
Tag: Art
Ai Weiwei says mother, 90, warns him against China return
The Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has said his desire to be reunited with his 90-year-old mother could lead him to return to China, but that she has implored him not to give up his British exile. The sculptor and activist, who divides his time between Cambridge and Portugal, spent 81 days in custody in Beijing in 2011 and fled his home country four years later on the return of his passport. Asked by Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong, at an event in London whether people who…
China’s censorship reaches far beyond its own borders | Letter
I read with interest your editorial (The Guardian view on China’s censors: the sense of an (acceptable) ending, 24 August). In 2016, I was about to publish a book on pop art, which had a short section on artists responding to political and social turmoil in the 1960s, and which included an illustration of Jim Dine’s Drag – Johnson and Mao (1967). The etching depicts Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China and the US president Lyndon B Johnson, who sent troops to counter Chinese communist support in the…
Your Wednesday Briefing: Beijing’s Mass Testing Plan
Good morning. We’re covering Beijing’s scramble to quash the Omicron variant, Germany’s pivot to supplying Ukraine with heavy weaponry and a brownface controversy roiling Hong Kong. Mass testing in Beijing Faced with a growing number of coronavirus infections across Beijing, city officials are trying to test most of the Chinese capital’s 22 million residents in the hope of avoiding the pain of imposing a citywide lockdown like in Shanghai. Beijing is ordering mass testing across the city more quickly than in Shanghai, where officials started testing on a similar scale…
Budi Tek, 65, Dies; His Fortune Built a Vast Trove of Asian Art
Unlike many of those collectors, however, he always insisted that he had a civic obligation to display his art. After a few years showing his pieces in a Jakarta cafe, in 2007 he opened the Yuz Museum nearby, making admission free of charge. Even that wasn’t enough. As his collection of works from China grew, he zeroed in on an emerging art district in Shanghai, along the Huangpo River, for an even larger venue. He settled on a portion of an old airfield, and in 2014 opened his second Yuz…
‘Beijing Spring’ Review: The Politics of Aesthetics
Can art effect real change in the world? To this ever-urgent question, “Beijing Spring” — a new documentary about the titular movement for democratic expression that exploded in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in China — responds with a resounding yes. Directed by Andy Cohen with Gaylen Ross, the film focuses on the Stars Art Group, a collective of self-taught practitioners who seized on the tumult after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 and deployed their art like Molotov cocktails. They circulated their paintings and literature via underground magazines; papered…
Looking Close at the Fragile Beauty of Chinese Painting
It always feels like early autumn in the Chinese painting galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The lighting is warm but low; the décor, wheat-beige and nut-brown. Despite sparks of color, the ink-and-brush paintings are visually subdued; their images can be hard to read from even a short distance away. And although the galleries hold the museum’s permanent collection of Chinese paintings, no picture stays for long. Compared with Western-style oil painting — a hardy, meat-and-potatoes, survivalist medium — Classical Chinese painting is fragile. Often done in ink on…
Hung Liu, Artist Who Blended East and West, Is Dead at 73
Hung Liu, a Chinese American artist whose work merged past and present, East and West, earning her acclaim in her adopted country and censorship in the land of her birth, died on Aug. 7 at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 73. The cause was pancreatic cancer, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which represents Ms. Liu in New York, said in a statement. Her death came less than three weeks before the scheduled opening of a career survey, “Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands,” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.…