Oil on canvas

116 x 81 cm. 45 5/8 x 31 7/8 in.

Signed in Chinese on bottom right
LITERATURE
1997, An Exhibition of Wang Huai Qing's Paintings, National Museum of History, Taipei, p.55
1999, An Exhibition of Wang Huai Qing's Paintings, Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei, p.25
2005, Wang Huai Qing, Wang Huai Qing, Bejing, P.90
2007, Art of Wang Huai Qing, Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei
2010, Wang Huaiqing-A Painter's painting in Contemporary China, Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona, p.55

EXHIBITED
2 - 18 Jan 1999, An Exhibition of Wang Huai Qing's Painting, Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei
3 – 12 Dec 2007, An Exhibition of Wang Huai Qing's Painting, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai
22 Feb – 16 Mar 2008, An Exhibition of Wang Huai Qing's Painting, National Museum of History, Taipei
18 Nov 2010 – 10 Apr 2011, Wang Huaiqing-A Painter's painting in Contemporary China, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle

PROVENANCE
Lin & king Gallery,Taipei
Important Private Collection, Asia

From Strength to Strength
Wang Huaiqing 'Ming Furniture' Series-1234567
In 1981, the Wall Street Journal published a major article on a work by Chinese oil painter Wang Huaiqing and his influence in China. The work in question was Bole a classical painting infused with a strong modernist spirit that surprised those who believed modern art had come to a standstill in China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. In 1998, the China: 5,000 Years exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York included only two oil paintings from the 1990s, one of which was Wang's Night Revel, a piece the offered a sampling of the artist's creative interpretations based on his deep understanding of traditional culture.
Breaking Through: “Ming Furniture' – Past to Present
A trip to Huangshan in the 1980s led to an important change in the artistic style of Wang Huaiqing. The black roof tiles, white walls and exquisite structure of beams and columns in the homes of southern China inspired him in terms of their abstract form. It also transformed his understanding of the structure of wooden vessels into a consideration of artistic composition, which in turn enabled him to discover aesthetic meaning in the marks of time on traditional buildings. The Residences series marked the beginning of Wang's movement away from representational work as he increasingly explored semi-abstraction and formalism. It also established for him a highly distinctive personal style that differed markedly from the mainstream social realism and scar art of that time. Later, he began to look in more detail at the traditional furniture in people's homes and in 1991 his work Aura of the Great Ming, which focused on an old fashioned wooden armchair won the gold award at the first Chinese Oil Painting Annual Exhibition held at the National Art Museum of China, establishing a high point for the Ming Furniture series. This was not only a turning point in Wang Huaiqing's creative work it was also an important milestone in the history of contemporary Chinese art.
The work featured at the autumn auction, 1234567 comes from the Ming Furniture series and is an outstanding piece that showcases the artist's classical artistic language. It has also appeared in all the most important Wang Huaiqing painting albums and after featuring in a major solo exhibition by Wang at the National Museum of History in Taipei, the year it was finished, it was shown at his major exhibition for more than a decade. In 2010, the piece was selected for Wang Huaiqing - A Painter's Painter in Contemporary China at Seattle Art Museum, an indication of its prominence as one of Wang's premier artistic achievements and one of the most important works to come onto the market in recent years.
Choice of Choices: Chinese Civilization in a Round-backed Armchair
“It is not unusual to use a person to show the expressiveness of life, but using a chair for the same purpose requires long-term refinement from complex and subtle culture.”
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Ming furniture represents the pinnacle of handicraft art over more than 3,000 years of traditional Chinese furniture. It was also a point of intersection between Chinese literati spirit and the real world. Indeed, it was this combination of aesthetic appeal and sensory experience that allowed it to become a focal point for history, culture, aesthetic awareness and humanistic spirit. Wang Huaiqing chose “Ming furniture” as a motif for his paintings knowing that being imbued with a profound sense of eastern aesthetic charm it would be more than a compositional element, expressing his own sentimental reflections on traditional culture and desire to pass on that cultural heritage. If we review Wang's Ming Furniture series, from the earlyl Double Chairs（1989-1991） to the work that made his name Aura of the Great Ming （1991） and the current piece 1234567, “chairs” feature as the single most classic representative element.
In 1234567, the artist uses abstract expressive methods to display the most important shape in Ming furniture – the round-backed armchair. In the global history of furniture, the “round-backed armchair” design was unique to China and inspired many 20th century furniture designers to create modern works. For example, American modernist furniture designer Charles Eames was inspired to design the classic “armchair” in the 1950s. Moreover, in the world of Chinese cultural semiotics “chairs” have invariably been symbols of power and order. In this context, the round-backed armchair in 1234567 is also a crystallization of the history, culture, wisdom, aesthetics and even honor of the Chinese people.
Reality-Virtuality: A Black and White Traditional Look Back
Beginning with the Oriental Place series in the 1980s, Wang Huaiqing started using just black, white and grey in his works. In the Ming Furniture series he takes this one step further by presenting the main focus of the pieces – the furniture – in just black. In 1234567, Wang uses dense black ink lines to depict a “Ming round-backed armchair,” transforming the wood into a visual sensory experience of color, while also using gentle and strong strokes to create a wood texture that is reminiscent of rosewood. Within the blackness we can also see Chinese inscription-like calligraphy strokes and Western abstract semiotic forms and it is this perfect balance of eastern-style freehand and Western abstraction calmness that conveys the hardness and texture of Chinese wisdom.
Wang Huaiqing once summed up his creative language as: “Placing furniture against a virtual and empty background and changing the inevitable position of all furniture in the world – the floor” as seen in 1234567. In the background of this piece the large white area is broken up and layered on brown patches, the contrast of dark and light colors creating changes in shade that emphasize the visual volume of the chair in the foreground. The mottled strokes create a rich texture, as if telling the story of time, effectively extracting the furniture from reality and making it a transcendent symbol. As such, the “round-backed armchair” seems to float in the painting and appears to have lost any sense of attachment, containing hidden within it the loneliness of that detachment. The artist uses this to lay bare the historical and cultural fissures faced by modern society as it changes.
Graphic Power: Never Ending Deconstruction Games
Only through the juxtaposition of black and white does “structure” take on the eternal central role in the paintings of Wang Huaiqing. After strengthening the “structure” of objects in three dimensional space, he expresses them as forms of abstract “deconstruction” in two dimensions, of which the artist once said: “There is just one reason for painting objects ‘flat' and ‘even': objects that unfold in graphic space are more powerful.” From early works in which relatively complete three dimensional perspective chair outlines can be seen, to 1234567 which is a combination of flat lines, Wang uses uneven differences in the thickness of brush strokes to craft simple and unadorned “lines,” effectively elevating the wooden structure to independent lines in two dimensional space. In this way, the structural relationships of the round-backed armchair are magnified, imbuing the work with a penetrative visual tension.
Wang Huaiqing deliberately titled the work 1234567 to make it a distinctive part of the Ming Furniture series and used numbers to reference the process of reconstruction that takes place after the traditional round-backed armchair is subject to a series of modern deconstructions. The chair is broken down into seven distinctive pieces – left and right arms, a back panel, left and right legs, a seat and various rods, with the lines ingeniously transformed into numbers in the work. In this context, the numbers are a code, surrounded by the external shape and imbuing the work with a humorous playfulness, waiting for viewers to crack the code.

Price estimate:
HKD: 9,000,000 - 15,000,000
USD: 1,146,500 - 1,910,800

Auction Result:
HKD : 10,500,000