PROVENANCE:

Private collection, Taipei

(acquired directly from the artist)

Aacquired directly from the above by the present owner.

This autumn auction includes five classic paintings by Shiy De-jinn (lot 066 to lot 077) that all offered by a Taiwanese private collector. As one of the artist's close friends, he had studied art design in his youth and admired Shiy's art very much. In 1974, he got acquainted with the artist at a solo exhibition at Hong Lin Gallery in Taipei. Later between 1974 and 1976, while he was in military service in Kinmen, an island outside Taiwan where he had corresponded with the artist and also took several photographs of old houses. The painting "Chinese Flowering Crabapple" (lot 070) was a gift from the artist. In the later part of Shiy's life, the collector was one of few persons who were allowed to look after the artist in the hospital. The five paintings of this auction are acquired directly from the artist or from a close friend of the artist. It's more than two decades that the correct owner has collected these paintings.

Old Houses Showed Me the Way to Paintings

What I am most obsessed, fall for, or even felt the most beautiful things at this moment, are the old houses in Taiwan. Those traditional Chinese architectures have been evolving for over thousands of years, and their shapes have gradually become what majority of Chinese people's life requires. They are closely related to people, and become the highest ideas to the Chinese people, a contented "home".

Look at that energetic roof, the momentum, powerful lines and shapes, moderate size, warm colors, and humanness, just like a statue of a Chinese, standing between heaven and earth. It doesn't fight with or slaved by nature, it pursues harmony.

"Architectures are like the mother of arts in history."

Only through Chinese architectures, I can see the souls of Chinese people, their characteristics, their desires, their world views, their aesthetics, their chromatics, their amazing skills and magical creativities. And all of these great artistic treasures are somehow buried underneath the country soils, fading away without attentions. Old houses in Taiwan are my muse; they lead me to paint and to discover the artistic world.

To walk out of an old red bricks house is like hearing the most beautiful symphony. Have a look at those modern apartments; I couldn't stop thinking how ugly they are. I've just seen the brasses from Shang dynasty (1600 BC - 1046 BC) and the porcelains from Sung dynasty ( 960 AD - 1279 AD), now looking at the plastic dining utensils on the table; I understand we must tolerate this kind of shallow culture derived from industrialization. The oncoming modernity is unstoppable, but the crumble of ancient culture, is also irreparable. So, let's use the tradition to explore modernity! Let it effect by our superior traditions.

Flowers through the "Modern View"

To use "flowers" as the theme in the paintings is Chinese paintings' privilege. The flowers that western artists paint were already artfully arranged into a case, yet Chinese respect nature, we pursue the pleasure within nature. The flowers in Chinese paintings are definitely not specimens; artists already turned the flowers, branches, and leaves into a part of consciousness, and then present them through abstract, calligraphic way. What is presented is the thoughts and the spirit of the artist. Therefore in some of the Chinese paintings, plants and flowers possess other symbolic meanings. Chrysanthemum, bamboo, orchid and plum blossoms are called the four gentlemen, they signify greatheart, peony signifies wealth, and pine tree signifies long spring.

Over the past thousand years, the symbolic meaning of flowers has developed gradually, they have become the most banal themes in paintings, their forms are fixed and lack of creativity. Now I'm going to give "flowers" a new life, I'm going to recreate them, through a Chinese "Modern View", to observe, to present with different materials, and try to bring new meanings, to this traditional subject.

There are no plum blossoms and peonies in Taiwan, but paintings about them can be found everywhere. Why living in the recent 20 to 30 years in Taiwan no one dared to paint phoenix flowers? Or local flowers? Is it because the great artists in Chinese history haven't done that, so we have no idea how to paint them? We should learn from the artists from the Five dynasties and Sung dynasty, to face the real nature, flowers and animals, and paint. Only by doing so can we break away from the strains from the past and prove ourselves. Turn the ink to colors, reestablish colors, through our own research; we arrange the picture and the spaces. We shouldn't apply glamorous water ink techniques and styles, but only through steady brush strokes to reach the fulfillment deep down our hearts.

The reason why I insist to paint right in front of the nature is because that changes inside the nature. That kind of atmosphere, magical colors can never be painted or confined inside a studio, and it can never be dreamt by painters who kept recreate nature. I need it, I need the nature, I lean my soul next to it, I felt endless energies and strength flows into my body, therefore I use my brush to paint this exactly moment of my body and nature's combination to a picture. I was capturing a kind of beauty, verve, a life form, a characteristic of a place. I was immersed in love and motives. Under the grey, lonely sky, I sip the green of grass, the gold of the sunset, and the red of old brick houses...... and this is my art, it doesn't live inside of ancient painting, or dreams, and never in western trends.

(Quotations from Shiy De-jinn, "Shih De-jinn - I paint, I think, I speak", Taipei, 1977)