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- modest way. My first Chinese watercolour painting was a work by Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) who went on to become one of the most sought after artists of the 20th century.
As it soon became obvious that price-wise the category was taking off, I resolved to try to obtain one good representative watercolour example of every artist I thought to be worth collecting, who was living or who had died in the 20th century, whilst they were still available at a reasonable price. This wide field gave my collecting bags of scope and also involved testing to a maximum my personal taste, as I do not read or speak Chinese. Pure calligraphy, which had served as the equivalent of Chinese abstract painting, was ruled out as a collecting area for this reason. Further the Chinese collectors in Flong Kong at the time scoffed at a �gweilo� seriously collecting Chinese paintings and this provided just the challenge to me that was needed. They have since ceased to scoff. I had the advantage in coming to this collecting field with a deep knowledge of Chinese art and the interests and collecting taste of the Chinese scholar/mandarin acquired in forming my Chinese art collection in areas other than paintings since 1958. Many of the art dealers with whom I had dealt were also selling paintings, and their expertise in this area was considerable.
The number of artists in a country as large as China was enormous, and their work varied from pedestrian to very pleasing. Many merely followed the works of more estab�lished artists without much inspiration and could be ruled out for the collection. I realized that the task I had set myself was impossible as with each decade another batch of artists I felt worth collecting appeared. Even if I had identified an artist as worth collecting there was frequently difficulty in getting a good example of his work.
In making my choice of paintings I, on occasions, chose paintings that were important or interesting for reasons other than their pure aesthetics. I thought it important that the troubled times in which they were conceived, and the illustration of the historical processes then unfolding, should not be overlooked. For instance, there is in the collection an important painting by Fluang Yongyu (b. 1924) of four baked Shanghai crabs one of which is turned over showing it is a female one. The inscription talks about crabs poisoning you, if left to go stale; therefore they had to be cooked. The painting was done the week the �Gang of Four� represented by the crabs was put on trial and the political statement being made is obvious.
I acquired paintings not only in Hong Kong but also in China itself and elsewhere. In the end, when I eventually called a halt to collecting more Chinese watercolour paintings in about 1990,1 had managed to acquire representative examples of about 300 different 20th century Chinese watercolour artists I considered worth including in the collection. Some artists are already well established, others are now becoming recognized and others are still almost unknown. The collection represents one of the largest collections of 20th century Chinese watercolour paintings known outside China at this time.
Sotheby�s in the late 1970s were starting to have specialist sales in precisely this area of art in New York, which they later extended to Hong Kong. Christie�s later joined them in selling this category in New York and Hong Kong. These auction houses revolutionized the prices which good Chinese art was to fetch over the next 20 years and many paintings were acquired in such sales over the years.
The principal reason I started collecting Chinese 20th century watercolour paintings was that it seemed to me that a great flowering was then taking place in this media in China, in contrast to the ever more outrageous and ugly flowerings of so-called art in the West where I truly believe the art community has all but lost its way with beauty seldom in evidence.
Chinese painting developed along very different lines from painting in the West and essentially grew out of Chinese calligraphy, which has a history stretching back several thousand years.
Chinese paintings prior to 1900 were exclusively watercolours executed generally either on paper or silk and were traditionally mounted in scroll form or as album leaves.
The Chinese artists excelled in this media, but the criteria used to judge a painting developed in the West, with its emphasis on composition, perspective, line, colour, chiaroscuro (light and shade), were not given the same importance in China. Because of
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