.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
George Chann's signature use of Western Abstractionism, combined with the beauty of Chinese calligraphy, featured in the Asian 20th Century Day Sale, display his singular collage combining calligraphic characters over a multiplex of colors that directly echo Abstract Expressionist spontaneity. The works presented here highlight Chann's keen use of color and finesse for creating order out of chaos while also demonstrating his artistic qualities as a lyrical abstract painter. In these paintings, the calligraphy runs freely throughout the canvas in constant streams turning into a visual vocabulary of broken fragments. Overlapping and intermingling in a communion of color and shimmering lines, the pieces are composed together resulting in a textual richness that redefine meaning through aesthetic abstraction.
Untitled (Lot 236) and Harbour Scene (Lot 237) are works from the early 1940s. It depicts beautiful scenery by using Post-impressionism and expressed the care of humanism.
Hong Kong Harbour (Lot 238) is a sequel of the artist's early exploration of Impressionism and the Post-Impressionists. It depicts with a lively, dynamic brushwork the charming vista of a harbour, and is for the artist an alternative to artistic expression besides abstractionism. The canvas is divided by the boats that berth along the coastline. In the foreground is a scatter of boats over a large board of water, where the brilliant variation of rich colours and the smooth, forceful brushwork conjure up the image of a shimmering sea. In the background, shafts of light disperse over the distant sky and the mist-wreathed mountain range, shading them with reddish black, and create such a magnificent scene that the sky and the water seem to be mingled. The strong rhythm of the picture brings to us the sheer vitality of the harbour, and exhibits the artist's remarkable skill in integrating Western and Chinese medium of painting in his realistic depiction.
In 1950s, Abstractionism became the main stream of art in the U.S. and Chann also wondered the next direction of the style of his art work and started exploring the rich cultural sources of his motherland. He adopted black and white as the base colors in the beginning and combined the theory of Abstractionism with the style and beauty of Chinese calligraphy. During 1960 to 1970, more colors and textures were introduced gradually to the experiment of his abstract art work, Chinese Junk (Lot 239) is one of the work from this stage. The artist uses the rubbing from ancient bamboo books, silk books or inscription on the stele as the base in Script Style Calligraphy (Lot 240), The Song of Variation (Lot 241) and Variation of Inscriptions (Lot 242) cuts the papers into wracks to collage on the canvas. By applying various materials such as ink, water color and pastel and writing with calligraphic strokes, he piles the pictures with complicated, exquisite and rich visual layers. The artist paints smooth colours on the canvas by using the strokes of dian (dot), heng (horizontal), shu (vertical), pie (Throw away) and na (press down) from calligraphy and stacks antique-like texture by having oil painting to establish the time sense suggested by the oldness of the traces. Chann relies on the verve of Chinese calligraphy and the beauty of antiquity in a seemingly random filtrating and re-constructing process to re-define the words and symbols, releasing the pure aesthetics and power of calligraphy, and forming the individual Chinese abstract style of thinking and painting.
Untitled (Lot 236) and Harbour Scene (Lot 237) are works from the early 1940s. It depicts beautiful scenery by using Post-impressionism and expressed the care of humanism.
Hong Kong Harbour (Lot 238) is a sequel of the artist's early exploration of Impressionism and the Post-Impressionists. It depicts with a lively, dynamic brushwork the charming vista of a harbour, and is for the artist an alternative to artistic expression besides abstractionism. The canvas is divided by the boats that berth along the coastline. In the foreground is a scatter of boats over a large board of water, where the brilliant variation of rich colours and the smooth, forceful brushwork conjure up the image of a shimmering sea. In the background, shafts of light disperse over the distant sky and the mist-wreathed mountain range, shading them with reddish black, and create such a magnificent scene that the sky and the water seem to be mingled. The strong rhythm of the picture brings to us the sheer vitality of the harbour, and exhibits the artist's remarkable skill in integrating Western and Chinese medium of painting in his realistic depiction.
In 1950s, Abstractionism became the main stream of art in the U.S. and Chann also wondered the next direction of the style of his art work and started exploring the rich cultural sources of his motherland. He adopted black and white as the base colors in the beginning and combined the theory of Abstractionism with the style and beauty of Chinese calligraphy. During 1960 to 1970, more colors and textures were introduced gradually to the experiment of his abstract art work, Chinese Junk (Lot 239) is one of the work from this stage. The artist uses the rubbing from ancient bamboo books, silk books or inscription on the stele as the base in Script Style Calligraphy (Lot 240), The Song of Variation (Lot 241) and Variation of Inscriptions (Lot 242) cuts the papers into wracks to collage on the canvas. By applying various materials such as ink, water color and pastel and writing with calligraphic strokes, he piles the pictures with complicated, exquisite and rich visual layers. The artist paints smooth colours on the canvas by using the strokes of dian (dot), heng (horizontal), shu (vertical), pie (Throw away) and na (press down) from calligraphy and stacks antique-like texture by having oil painting to establish the time sense suggested by the oldness of the traces. Chann relies on the verve of Chinese calligraphy and the beauty of antiquity in a seemingly random filtrating and re-constructing process to re-define the words and symbols, releasing the pure aesthetics and power of calligraphy, and forming the individual Chinese abstract style of thinking and painting.