ILLUSTRATED:

Senior Taiwanese painter Chen Te-wang was born into a family of gold dealers in what was then Taipei's Yunglo Ting (today's Tihua Street). Chen discovered his love for painting very early. He once said, "Ever since I was very little I simply loved to paint. I mean, I just loved it: all I was ever thinking about, all I ever wanted was to paint. Nothing else mattered."Taking a keen interest in Western painting and artists, Chen did by no means follow or imitate their work blindly, but rather insisted on finding his own path.

Chen Te-wang spent a lifetime studying the various aspects of Western painting, from design and composition to coloring, space and perspective. Thus steeped in the traditions of those who went before him, he gradually discovered his own world of painting. For him, art was a lifelong pursuit, and even in his later years, already emaciated with disease, he continued to create quite a few masterpieces. On his dying bed, Chen kept painting invisible things in the air, pretending his hand was a brush-he was filled with melancholy and regret, observing wistfully that there were still so many things that he wished to paint. Chen was a determined man, stubborn even, persevering in his one passion. Yet his pictures convey utter peace and tranquility, and invite the viewer to explore the wide expanses and remote corners of the artist's soul.

The present lot, "Guanyin Mountain" is from 1973, one of an entire series called "Views of Mount Guanyin" which was one of the main motifs and a major artistic focus of Chen's work. He spent his whole life elaborating on this theme, and his painstaking efforts have yielded paintings that reveal both the tranquility and the force of nature in one panoramic view. His vistas are largely made up of multiple layers of overlapping paint, hues of blue and green mostly that combine to create an atmosphere of mystic beauty. As Georges Braque used to say, "Don't look at my paintings and go, 'Ah, only two or three different colors...'You have no idea how much meticulous work and thought were necessary to come up with those specific shades and hues."The same can be said of Chen Te-wang: his lifelong studies and scrupulous research translated into finely intermeshed colors and forms that make the canvas come alive with the painter's vision. How much practice, how much experience and how much persistence were necessary before this vision could be expressed with such clarity and depth!