The April auction includes a Private Collection of Chinese scroll paintings (lots 2-6), ranging in date from the 16th to the early 20th century. They have been in the possession of the current owner (CE) for over 60 years and were purchased in Hong Kong at a seminal time in the colony’s history. Here we find out about life in Hong Kong at the time and how the acquisition of the scroll paintings came about.
For a couple of years in the early 1960s CE was based in the Hong Kong bureau of the US magazine Life, from where he travelled on a regular basis to India, South East Asia, Indonesia and Japan. Life was launched in 1936 and, until it ceased publication as a weekly publication in 1972, was one of America’s most popular magazines renowned for its photojournalism. CE’s role as correspondent covered the generation of image captions and attention-grabbing headlines in the presentation of Life’s ground-breaking images. In a pre-digital world, the tracking and safe transport of images to the magazine’s New York headquarters to a strict publishing schedule – another of CE’s responsibilities – was a highly complex task. Life’s photographers operated in remote and tricky locations and their precious images, caught once only on film, were vital to the format and success of the magazine.
In Hong Kong CE lived in a house built in the 1930s, with a view of Deepwater Bay, living in a whole house was not unusual in Hong Kong at the time. Some years later on a visit to Hong Kong CE was to find his former home had been demolished and, in its place a smart apartment building had been built. At the time of his residence Hong Kong was caught up in the aftermath of the effects of China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), the mass industrialisation project led by the Chinese Communist Party and launched by CCP leader Mao Zedong with the aim of transforming China from an agrarian to an industrialised society based on the formation of people’s communes. Millions of Chinese became state workers through the investment in industry, and urban populations swelled, however, rural food production could not cope with the high demands made of it and swathes of young people who had hitherto worked on country farms were conscripted to the People’s Militia, so depleting the workforce. The consequence was an extreme, devastating famine which is estimated to have claimed the lives of between 15-45m people, with rural areas badly hit. CE recalls an early morning in the New Territories during which he spotted starving Chinese refugees sheltering in bushes, roughly 5-6 miles from the border, they were clearly desperate to escape to Hong Kong. Shenzhen, just 17 miles from Hong Kong, was at the time undeveloped, but it provided a crucial corridor through which mainland Chinese refugees flooded to the colony. The most intense influx took place in May 1962 when up to 140,000 individuals entered Hong Kong, some swimming across Shenzhen and Dapeng bays where many perished. However, as the 1960s progressed Hong Kong’s manufacturing sector increased along with the demand for labour, and so the immigrant population became more seamlessly absorbed and integrated.
CE describes the timing of his two years in Hong Kong as ‘extremely lucky’, the city still had its sense of history, tourist numbers were low and the interference of mainland China in daily life was negligible. Of course, Hong Kong had its poor, deprived areas and refugees from mainland China struggled – they had to seek work where and how they could. CE’s own chef had come to Hong Kong from northern China, where he had cooked for an English family, so CE’s family were able to eat a varied range of dishes.
CE had long enjoyed collecting, as had other fellow correspondent colleagues at Life magazine, but he doesn’t know how Shih-I Hsiung (1902-1991) came to be in his office with his offer of Chinese paintings for sale. Hsiung had made his name with his play Lady Precious Stream, written in 1934 and just two years later he moved to England to study English at Queen Mary College, University of London. Lady Precious Stream ran for 1,000 nights at the Little Theatre, John Street (now John Adam Street), London (part of the Adelphi development) and later transferred to Broadway. In an article titled The Happy Hsiungs, published in Good Housekeeping magazine, 1 May 1946, Shih-I and his wife Dymia, with four of their children, are settled (since 1943) at Grove House, Oxford, having moved to the city to educate their children with a view to their later admission to the University. In Flowering Exile: An Autobiographical Excursion, 1952, Dymia described Grove House as ‘the social centre of the Chinese community in England’, and with this work she became the first Chinese woman in Britain to write a fictionalised autobiography.
Hsiung produced other works after Lady Precious Stream, but none of them were as popular or quite as successful, and by the 1960s he had somewhat fallen on hard times with income from his writing having dried up. At this time Hsiung was living in Hong Kong, working as an informal, respected broker in the sale of Chinese scroll paintings brought by Chinese scholars and collectors to Hong Kong on their departure from the mainland. Although the destruction of Chinese artefacts and cultural items is associated with the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) the process was underway with the Great Leap Forward. Four of the scroll paintings (lots 3-6) in our auction were purchased through Hsiung, with lot 2, Follower of Wen Zhenming (1470-1559), possibly Wen Jia (1501-1583), Landscape with scholars in a pavilion, acquired from T T Ma, a wealthy Hong Kong stockbroker and collector who owned a substantial and important number of scroll paintings. CE recollects that Ma displayed works for sale from his collection in his own Hong Kong apartment and invited potential buyers to view them prior to purchase.
As an art work scroll paintings can be dated to the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD), the form is useful for transportation and storage, and through the process of unscrolling a dynamic narrative can be revealed in stages. CE notes that scroll paintings are not generally hung up and displayed, they are too fragile for this, and he attributes the fine condition of the 18th century scroll painting, lot 3, Bodhidharma Crossing the Yangtze on a reed, 1748, by Huang Shen (1687-1772), to careful storage, rolled up and away from the light. Shen’s work was on display (item no. 15) in the 1965 exhibition, The Eccentric Painters of China, held at the Andrew Dickson Museum of Art, Cornell University and curated by Martie W Young, the university’s first Asian Art Professor, from 1959-1998.
CE’s close proximity to Taiwan provided him with more luck, enabling him to make a week-long trip to view the remarkable collection of Chinese art and artefacts, primarily relocated from the Beijing Palace Museum but also other institutions in mainland China during the government of the Republic of China’s retreat to Taiwan. Since 1965 the collection has been housed at the National Palace Museum, but at the time of CE’s visit a number of temporary locations throughout Taiwan were in use. The collection represents a comprehensive record of over 8,000 years of Chinese history, from the Neolithic to the modern era, through 609,000 items covering metalwork, ceramics, carvings, rare books and documents but CE’s focus was the collection of Chinese paintings, arguably the finest in the world, and some of which he was able to view first hand. Dating from the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the modern era, over 1,000 years of Chinese painting is covered, featuring a number of genres: landscapes, flowers and birds, figure painting and boundary painting. CE’s visit to Taiwan was clearly an exceptional and special experience.
The April Edit: 100 lots of Fine & Decorative Interiors | A Private Collection of Chinese scroll paintings (lots 2-6)
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