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Lot Essay
"Painting is about colour and form. There are basically two types of colour: warm and cool. One can express just about any emotion playing with colour"
Luis Chan
It is indeed through his mastery of colours that Luis Chan welcomes his audience into his imaginative landscapes filled with fantastical creatures. Neither Eastern nor Western, neither abstract nor realist, his works demonstrate a unique approach to art which originates purely from within, subconsciously drawing from his own visual repertoire.
Having received a western education, his upbringing in Hong Kong also provided him deeply engrained Oriental roots. This cultural fusion particularly reverberates in his works, whether it is with the use of oil painting, or with the incorporation of Chinese landscape elements combined with flamboyant colours.
While all three works offered here exemplify three different styles of Chan's artistic career, they all share the common root in the exploration of colour and space. Untitled (Sea of Mystery) (Lot 434), Admirers of the Pink Girl (Lot 435) and Variation of A Sunny Day - Morning, Noon, Sunset (Lot 436) are all reminiscent of Fauvism as well as Abstract Expressionism, not only because of the colour palette, but also in their spatial structure. The vertical layered compositions concurrently refer to Chinese handscroll landscape painting. Admirers of the Pink Girl will play on positive and negative space within traditional a Chinese landscape, where the effects of depth and perspective are nonexistent, and Variations of a Sunny Day reminds us of Zhang Daqian's splashed and colourful landscapes.
Very much involved with Hong Kong's artistic community, Luis Chan is not a painter by profession, instead, he spent most of his life working by day, painting by night, for the love of the act of painting for himself. With very little formal training (a one year distance programme on watercolour in 1927), he would nourish his visual repertoire by subscribing to Western art publications and drawing inspiration from the reproductions he would see. His passion and emotions immediately transpire from these works through the playful combination of powerful colours and composition. Although the viewer oscillates between abstraction and figurative representation, the fantastical universe remains unique and deeply personal.
Luis Chan
It is indeed through his mastery of colours that Luis Chan welcomes his audience into his imaginative landscapes filled with fantastical creatures. Neither Eastern nor Western, neither abstract nor realist, his works demonstrate a unique approach to art which originates purely from within, subconsciously drawing from his own visual repertoire.
Having received a western education, his upbringing in Hong Kong also provided him deeply engrained Oriental roots. This cultural fusion particularly reverberates in his works, whether it is with the use of oil painting, or with the incorporation of Chinese landscape elements combined with flamboyant colours.
While all three works offered here exemplify three different styles of Chan's artistic career, they all share the common root in the exploration of colour and space. Untitled (Sea of Mystery) (Lot 434), Admirers of the Pink Girl (Lot 435) and Variation of A Sunny Day - Morning, Noon, Sunset (Lot 436) are all reminiscent of Fauvism as well as Abstract Expressionism, not only because of the colour palette, but also in their spatial structure. The vertical layered compositions concurrently refer to Chinese handscroll landscape painting. Admirers of the Pink Girl will play on positive and negative space within traditional a Chinese landscape, where the effects of depth and perspective are nonexistent, and Variations of a Sunny Day reminds us of Zhang Daqian's splashed and colourful landscapes.
Very much involved with Hong Kong's artistic community, Luis Chan is not a painter by profession, instead, he spent most of his life working by day, painting by night, for the love of the act of painting for himself. With very little formal training (a one year distance programme on watercolour in 1927), he would nourish his visual repertoire by subscribing to Western art publications and drawing inspiration from the reproductions he would see. His passion and emotions immediately transpire from these works through the playful combination of powerful colours and composition. Although the viewer oscillates between abstraction and figurative representation, the fantastical universe remains unique and deeply personal.