A Rarity in Chinese Contemporary Art

Rarely, if ever, does the auction market afford a comprehensive snapshot of another time and another place. Yet, on the 20th September 2007 at 2pm, Sotheby’s New York will be offering 12 paintings from the 1980s in China at the auction Contemporary Art Asia. The paintings, lots 107 to 118, may be viewed on www.sothebys.com

The 1980s in China were a time of intellectual ferment and political experimentation, when Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues tried to push a reform agenda in the face of strong and hard line communist resistance organized by Chen Yun, Deng Liqun and others. The decade also saw a great outburst of excitement among the younger generation of artists, whose creativity had been stifled by 20 years of left-wing socialist realist orthodoxy culminating in the 10 years of Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The 1980s saw this generation of artists exposed to every kind of cultural influence from ancient Chinese to post-modernism. Their works of that decade were a response to the wild ferment of the times and thus were conformist only to the extent that they differed from each other and attempted to differ from the immediate past.

Read the rest of the essay as a PDF file or see the the paintings in the collection here or at www.sothebys.com