This painting is to be sold with a certificate of authunticity
signed by the artist's daughter

THE TRAJECTORY - OF AN OVERSEA AMERICAN GEORGE CHANN

LYRICAL USE OF COLORS AND LINES

Abstract epitomizes qualities that testify to the vitality of George Chann’s abstract works filled with individual statements. In continuous streams and broken fragments, these intermingling and overlapping diaphanous white lines wend through and around blasts of color in tones of yellow, black, blue, magenta, orange, and burgundy. It constitutes a complete communion of patches of color and shimmering lines that melodiously bound together like melodies in a harmonious composition. These interweaving lines are reminiscent of the oriental brocade pattern enticing one to look beyond the surface stillness and physical reality into Chann’s imagination.

A UNIQUE TRAJECTORY

George Chann’s earliest figurative and realist paintings of disfranchised children found between the cracks of society while he was a graduate student at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles were expressions of the immediate world around him. Although there appears to be a strong hint of a social consciousness and humanistic interests at the heart of his painting, it nonetheless captivates the energy of the moment as he portrays a person or a scene. This energy is amplified when he later embarked on abstraction in the 1950s, simultaneously expressing more intangible ideas derived from his visit to Mainland China from 1947 to 1949 as these experiences ignited a new understanding of Chinese art, culture and more importantly, his identity after 22 years of departure from his homeland. The lyrical use of colors and lines in Abstract illuminates the expression of Chann’s innermost emotional and psychological worlds, transpired in the form of spontaneity through his magnificent and lyrical use of the color palette. Despite the garnished richness transpired by the present lot, unlike the raw works of Jackson Pollock’s who painted within a single world, Chann painted across worlds as his abstract art is inspired by his unique emotional and psychological background as an immigrant whom should be distinguished from the larger part of an aggressive American art mentality that was constantly seeking an identity that was thoroughly American and to define itself separate from the rest of the world during the wave of the abstract expressionism. Moreover, Chann’s incorporation of various mediums such as college and oil on the present lot also added another dimension to his work. More specifically, a textual variety to his painting that oil alone would not have achieved.

George Chann’s oeuvre reflects an artist of the diaspora who had successfully carried his own unique pictorial traditions to the American soil in which he settled. Similar to other artists such as Yun Gee who was bought to a foreign world with little autonomy on their part as a child with little knowledge of his artistic heritage, yet it was something that subtly informed his art throughout the artist’s life. Abstract is infused with a great wave of dynamic vitality and spontaneity that speaks to both to Western art and Chinese concerns. It also constitutes the fruition of Chann’s attempt in employing his own intrinsic philosophy and Chinese identity as a strategy to exhibit his own personalities while simultaneously engaging within the compositional framework of Contemporary Western art. Although George Chann’s was deemed as a forgotten artist whose artistic talent had been largely dismissed for the most part of his life, his perseverance and diligence in artistic productions have afforded him with his own unique signature within the context of art history.