Page 400 - Bonhams Fine Chinese Art Nov 2013 London

Property from a British Private Collection
英國私人收藏藏品
Lots 397 - 405

A personal NOTE FROM THE COLLECTOR
We first saw these remarkable Chinese lacquers
during their UK public showing at the November 1998
Olympia Antiques Fair; the Chinese Ambassador had
kindly opened the exhibition.
We were amazed at their quality, with long-established
high-quality manufacturing techniques used to portray
outstanding achievements in the ‘New China’. We
knew that China had always held calligraphy and the
other visual arts in the highest esteem, but wrongly
believed that matters had changed since 1949 and
the finest quality was no longer produced.
Not a bit of it!
We should not have been so unquestioning of the
oft-stated view that the Arts had declined in China.
These lacquer panels, commissioned at the highest
levels of Government from the later 1960s, proved the
opposite i.e. the virtue of the old Latin phrase ‘Human
life is short, but art travels on and on down human
history’ (ars longa, vita brevis est). The technical
standards achieved at Yangzhou at this period equal
any in the long history of Chinese lacquer.
Nonetheless, these astonishing lacquers were
completed at a time of great difficulties and radical
change for the Chinese peoples, in their determination
to transform the old Imperial agricultural order
and start anew. They celebrate key moments,
and monuments, in China’s inexorable surge from
humiliation to wealth and power through harnessing
industrialised capitalism. The ‘resilience and vitality’
depicted on these panels is part of a pattern which
explains the unparalleled material and cultural
development of China in the last 20 years.
We have much enjoyed the company of this great art
for some 14 years. Declining health has encouraged
us to offer this group for sale now, to give other
collectors the chance to enjoy these remarkable
and historically important documents reflecting 20th
century China in transition.