Wang Qingquan, école chinoise contemporaine; Maison de thé près du lac, 2006.

Wang Qingquan, école chinoise contemporaine; Maison de thé près du lac, 2006. Photo Eric Pillon Enchères

Huile sur toile signée et datée en bas à droite. 80 x 100 - Estimation : 6 000 / 8 000 €

Eric Pillon Enchères - 78000 Versailles. Vente aux enchères du Dimanche 8 mai 2011. Hôtel des Ventes du Château - 13, avenue de Saint-Cloud.. Tel 01 39 02 40 40

Thousands March in Hong Kong to Demand the Release of Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei

Artists hold banners including one featuring a portrait of detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei during a protest urging for his release, in Hong Kong April 23, 2011. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

HONG KONG (REUTERS).- Over one thousand protesters in Hong Kong took to the streets to demand the release of detained Chinese artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei on Saturday, scuffling briefly with police.

The rally -- the largest in a string of protests across the city in recent weeks -- has underscored Hong Kong's growing role as a hotbed of support for Ai with local pro-democracy activists and artists ratcheting up pressure on Beijing over its heavy crackdown on dissidents, human rights lawyers and protesters challenging Communist Party controls and censorship.

Protesters held up banners with the words "Who's afraid of Weiwei" and banged on drums as they snaked their way through busy districts to the harbor-front Cultural Center, where they sang, performed and chanted for Ai's release.

"It's had a lot of impact," said John Batten, a Hong Kong-based art critic and commentator who attended the rally. "The message is purely about freedom of expression ... it's not just Ai Weiwei, there's a whole lot of repression that's going on in China."

Organizers said 2000 people showed up, marshaled by a heavy police contingent through busy streets. While the event was largely peaceful, brief skirmishes with police broke out as tempers flared.

Graffiti images of Ai have also been appearing across the former British colony which reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, in subways, streets and prominent public spaces, spray-painted by an anonymous artist and sparking a police investigation.

Ai's detention in Beijing on April 3, after being prevented from boarding a flight to Hong Kong, has sparked criticism from Western governments, with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying she was "deeply concerned" about the clampdown.

Chinese authorities have been vague on Ai's charges, only saying he's under investigation for "suspected economic crimes" .  (Reporting by James Pomfret)

A pro-democracy protester wears a mask of detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei during a march in Hong Kong Saturday, April 23, 2011 as they demand release of Ai. U.S. diplomats will discuss recent disappearances and detentions of Chinese dissidents during human rights talks in Beijing next week, the U.S. State Department said. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung

Une pétition pour Ai Weiwei victime de piratage informatique

Ai Weiwei avec sa liste des noms des écoliers qui ont succombé dans le tremblement de terre au Sichuan en 2008, affiché sur le mur de son bureau au FAKE Design à Pékin, mai 2009 - © photo travaux de Ai Weiwei - 2009 - © Ai Weiwei

PEKIN (CHINE)  – Le site hébergeur d’une importante pétition pour la libération d’Ai Weiwei rencontre des difficultés de fonctionnement. Ces perturbations sont dues à des attaques informatiques en provenance de Chine.

Aux Etats-Unis, le site internet Change.org qui héberge une pétition pour la libération de l’artiste contestataire chinois Ai Weiwei fait l’objet d’un piratage informatique. Depuis quelques jours, son fonctionnement connaît d’importantes perturbations qui pourraient être commanditées par les autorités chinoises.

Lundi 18 avril, en raison d’une attaque, la pétition a été indisponible et son utilisation impossible durant plusieurs heures. Des ordinateurs infectés de programmes malveillants ont alors provoqué la paralysie du site par une saturation de ses connexions. Depuis, les équipes en charge de la maintenance du site ont été renforcées. Désormais, l'attaque est quasiment contrée et le nombre de signatures continue d’augmenter.

Ben Rattray, le directeur de Change.org, est parvenu à localiser la source de ces intrusions. Lorsqu’il a découvert que celles-ci provenaient de Chine, l’hébergeur a sollicité le soutien de son gouvernement.

C’est le Guggenheim Museum de New York qui est à l’origine de cette pétition. Plusieurs grands musées y ont adhéré à travers le monde : le Metropolitan Museum of Art de New York, la Tate Modern de Londres ou encore le Musée national d'art moderne de Paris. Par cette pétition, les membres de la communauté artistique internationale crient leur inquiétude et leur déception.

A l’insécurité de l’action virtuelle répond la multiplication des mobilisations physiques. Les restrictions à la liberté d’expression ne faisant que sensibiliser davantage l’intérêt collectif, de nouvelles manifestations sont prévues ce dimanche devant les ambassades et consulats chinois. (www.artclair.com)

Signez en ligne la pétition pour soutenir Ai Weiwei : www.change.org/petitions/call-for-the-release-of-ai-weiwei

"Libérez Ai Wewei" inscrit sur la façade de la Tate Modern de Londres - © photo Wetzig Elke (Elya) - 10 avril 2011 - Licence CC BY-SA 3.0

Qiu Zhijie (B. 1969), Tattoo II

Qiu Zhijie (B. 1969), Tattoo II. Photo Sotheby's

chromogenic print mounted on aluminium board. Signed in Pinyin and Chinese, titled in English and numbered 8/10 on the reverse. Executed in 1994; 170 by 146 cm.; 66 7/8 by 57 1/2 in. Estimate 300,000—400,000 HKD. Lot Sold 500,000 HKD

PROVENANCE: Galerie Loft, Paris and Hong Kong

EXHIBITED: USA, Chicago, The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; Eugene, University of Oregon Museum of Art; Hanover, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Transience - Chinese Experiemental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, 1999, p.169 and back cover
France, Paris, Espace Cardin, Paris-Pékin, 2002, p.157
Brazil, São Paulo, Museu de Arte de Brasília, China- Contemporary Art, 2002, p.177
France, Beziers, Espace Culturel Paul Riquet, Et Moi, Et Moi Et Moi...Portraits Chinois, 11 Jun - 18 July, 2004, pp. 3, 4, 38
China, Beijing, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Our Future, 2008, p. 107

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES: Chang Tsong-Zung, Michel Nuridsany, Made by Chinese, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris, France, 2001, p.113
Paris-Pékin Exposition, Beaux Arts, France, 2002, p. 24
Britta Erickson, On The Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter The West, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, USA, 2003, p. 78
Anne Lemonnier ed., Alors, la Chine?, Editions du Centre Pompidou, Paris, France 2003, p. 290
Christine Buci-Glucksmann ed., Modernités Chinoises, Skira, France, 2003, cover and p. 31
Boers Waling ed., Touching The Stones- China Art Today, Jahresring 53 Koenig, Köln, Germany, 2006, p. 151
Gao Song Yin, Qiu Zhijie, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, China, 2007, p. 64
China Art Book: The 80 Most Renowned Chinese Artists, Dumont Buchverlag, Koln, Germany, 2007, p. 312

NOTE: QIU ZHIJIE

Qiu Zhijie straddles the distinction between humanist artistic practice focused on the aesthetic legacies of Chinese tradition and more critical dialogues with the political and theoretical themes common to the art of the late modern era, contributing independently to both discourses and doing much to bridge their value systems. Working primarily in lens based media on the one hand and calligraphic brushwork on the other, the notion of technique becomes an explicitly and inherently referential framing device that serves to focus in on and dissect the much broader movements of implicit cultural systems of ideology. At stake here is the relationship between individual agency and the forces of the universe, the latter interpreted through a nuanced political view of culture writ large and the former motivated by the transience of choice and behavior. Exhibited in major public exhibitions including the Chinese national pavilion of the "Venice Biennale" (2009), the "Guangzhou Triennial" (2008, 2002), and the "São Paulo Biennial" (2002), Qiu first emerged in the seminal exhibition "China's New Art, Post-1989" (1993) and has also served as a writer, historian, and curator, most notably of the "Post-Sense Sensibility Series of Exhibitions" (1999-2003). Generally speaking, his practice sets out from the post-humanist rejection of utopian ideology that characterized the early 1990s and extends into a research based re-evaluation of historical meaning through transformative aesthetics of media.

Tattoo II could be categorized into Qiu Zhijie's earlier body of work, which focuses on the social constriction of the body and the contemporary urban environment. Here the artist composes a self-portrait from the waist up, his torso bare and his vacant gaze directed just to one side of the camera. The character bu for "no" is applied in thick red paint across his chest, neck, and mouth, continuing over his arms and onto the white wall behind such that the typographic element almost appears to be a distinct layer superimposed over the image of the artist. Qiu is here primarily interested in the way the subject can be formed by its social situation through the mechanisms of embodiment, making particular note of the ability of the semiotic or signifying system to exert influence over the human body, the latter functioning largely as a vehicle for its transmission. The photograph framed here, intensely iconic and unforgettable, serves to erase or otherwise obscure the boundary between man and his cultural environment while retaining visible signs of this ellipsis, demonstrating that the body itself is little more than an image that cannot but lose its independence within any surrounding context. Alongside these broader theoretical interests the symbolic choices of the work betray another facet of its production: the character is written in a style, color, and size most typically found in public propaganda murals, while the defiant body language of the artist stands firmly opposed to this intrusion into the personal realm. Notably, this latter symbolic reading is most present in the early images of the Tattoo series but fades in later contributions more concerned with optical effect and subject production.

Sotheby's. The Ullens Collection - The Nascence of Avant Garde China. 03 Apr 11. Hong Kong www.sothebys.com

Qiu Zhijie (B. 1969), Writing the "Orchid Pavilion Preface" One Thousand Times.

Qiu Zhijie (B. 1969), Writing the "Orchid Pavilion Preface" One Thousand Times. Photo Sotheby's

black and white photograph and video. Each photo titled in English and numbered 5/5; DVD signed in Pinyin and Chinese and numbered 9/25. Executed in 1990-1995. Each photo: 65 by 149.8 cm,; 25 5/8 by 59 in. video duration: 35 mins. Estimate 240,000—300,000 HKD. Lot Sold 800,000 HKD

PROVENANCE: Galerie Loft, Paris and Hong Kong

EXHIBITED: USA, New York, Asia Society Galleries and PS1 Contemporary Art Center; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Seattle, Tacoma Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery; Mexico, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo; China, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Inside Out - New Chinese Art, 1998-2000, plate 8
Guangzhou, Guangdong Museum of Art, The First Guangzhou Triennial: Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000), 2002, pp.150-151

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES: Lü Peng, 90's Art China 1990-1999, Hunan Fine Art Publishing House, 2000, p. 279
Wu Hung ed., Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West, New Art Media, Hong Kong, 2001, p. 97
Chang Tsong-Zung, Michel Nuridsany, Made by Chinese, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris, France, 2001, p.115
Britta Erickson, On The Edge:. Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter The West, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, USA, 2003, p. 76
Wu Hung, Art and Exhibition- Wu Hung on Contemporary Chinese Art, Lingnan Fine Art Publishing, 2005, p. 51
Lu Hong, Crossing Boundaries: China Avant-Garde Art 1979-2004, Hebei Fine Art Publishing House, China, 2006, p. 250
Gao Song Yin, Qiu Zhijie, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, China, 2007, pp. 62-63
Richard Vine, New China New Art, Prestel, Munich, Germany, 2008, p. 93
The Real Thing: Contemporary Art From China, Tate Liverpool, U.K., 2007, p. 96
Lü Peng, A History of Art in Twentieth Century China, Peking University Press, Beijing, China, 2009, p. 1024

NOTE: Please note that apart from the large size on offer, the work has been created in medium sizes (48 by 100 cm) and small sizes (28 by 60cm) as well. Both of these are made into editions of 10. The DVD, alternately, comes in an edition of 25 as every set of prints, regardless of size, is accompanied with its own disc.

QIU ZHIJIE. Qiu Zhijie straddles the distinction between humanist artistic practice focused on the aesthetic legacies of Chinese tradition and more critical dialogues with the political and theoretical themes common to the art of the late modern era, contributing independently to both discourses and doing much to bridge their value systems. Working primarily in lens based media on the one hand and calligraphic brushwork on the other, the notion of technique becomes an explicitly and inherently referential framing device that serves to focus in on and dissect the much broader movements of implicit cultural systems of ideology. At stake here is the relationship between individual agency and the forces of the universe, the latter interpreted through a nuanced political view of culture writ large and the former motivated by the transience of choice and behavior. Exhibited in major public exhibitions including the Chinese national pavilion of the "Venice Biennale" (2009), the "Guangzhou Triennial" (2008, 2002), and the "São Paulo Biennial" (2002), Qiu first emerged in the seminal exhibition "China's New Art, Post-1989" (1993) and has also served as a writer, historian, and curator, most notably of the "Post-Sense Sensibility Series of Exhibitions" (1999-2003). Generally speaking, his practice sets out from the post-humanist rejection of utopian ideology that characterized the early 1990s and extends into a research based re-evaluation of historical meaning through transformative aesthetics of media.

The photograph Writing the "Orchid Pavilion Preface" One Thousand Times documents an extensive performative action during which Qiu Zhijie wrote out in brush and ink a short piece of improvisational literature describing a gathering of the literati commonly ascribed to Wang Xizhi (AD 303-361), preserved in later generations as an outstanding calligraphic exemplar. Over the course of several years Qiu copied the 324 characters of the script some 1000 times in black ink on a single sheet of white paper, making everything following the first 50 iterations—approximately speaking—all but illegible. In the first of the five images contained in this work a single iteration sits on clean paper while the final component appears as a layer of pure black pigment; the three intervening pieces mark various states of this transition, also visible in a video used to record the process and in the body of the resulting object soaked through with ink. The artist's gesture is a poetic one positioned at a major turning point in his practice, growing out of his earlier interest in physical endurance and repetition, but also signals a turn toward his ensuing work with the place of the aesthetics of classical Chinese culture within the contemporary mode. In this reading the illegible paper implies that dedication to the literary tradition is always, eventually, a destructive proposition, but also links the body of the artist to this very heritage in a troubling and obscure way. Artistic practice is transformed into a trivial and repetitive use of time and materials, essentially bracketing off the existence of the artist and calling to the foreground of perception his materials and tools; here it is the camera and brush that conspire to produce this highly representative vision of culture made immanent.

Sotheby's. The Ullens Collection - The Nascence of Avant Garde China. 03 Apr 11. Hong Kong www.sothebys.com

Agapetus (B. 1968), Hati yang Membatu (Petrified Heart)

Agapetus (B. 1968), Hati yang Membatu (Petrified Heart). Photo Sotheby's

Signed, dated 10 and numbered 2/5 on the base of the cap. aluminium cast, paint; 145 by 123 by 53 cm.; 57 by 48 1/2 by 20 3/4 in. Estimate 140,000—220,000 HKD. Lot Sold 225,000 HKD

Executed in 2010, this work is number 2 from an edition of 5, plus 2 artist's proof.

Sotheby's. Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Paintings. | 04 Apr 11. Hong Kong www.sothebys.com

Shen Han Wu (B. 1950), Ancient Village 2.

Shen Han Wu (B. 1950), Ancient Village 2. photo Sotheby's

oil on canvas, signed and dated 2003; titled on the reverse, 71.1 by 55.9 cm. Estimate 10,000—15,000 USD. Lot Sold 23,750 USD

Sotheby's. Contemporary Art, 09 Mar 11 10:00 AM, New York www.sothebys.com

Ouyang Chun, "Painting TheKing" @ Augarten Contemporary

Ouyang Chun, The King's Woman (2008) © Li Liang

VIENNA.- Ouyang Chun's Painting The King is the first institutional one-man show to present the artist, who was born in Beijing in 1974, outside of China. The exhibition is on view from March 2, 2011 and runs June 12, 2011 at Augarten Contemporary. His cycle King, consisting of thirty paintings, some of which are more than five metres long, relates episodes from the life of a king in a breathtakingly painterly diversity, telling about his victories and defeats, about love and death. The pictures, which are partly crowded with figures and rendered in minute detail and partly feature an expressive and impasto brushwork, amalgamate history and fiction, as well as the search for beauty and the description of moral failure.

Ouyang Chun, © Li Liang

Exhibition curator Margrit Brehm: “The artist additionally augments the tension that arises from differences in the painterly rhythm and which marks the hybrid character of his art through the use of gold leaf and gold paint. Although Ouyang Chun thus refers to an old tradition of Chinese art, his pictures are anything but traditional. Their charm lies in the fact that they defy any attempt at categorization, which strikes Western spectators all the more since a large part of contemporary art from China that was on display in Europe in recent years was committed to Political Pop or Cynical Realism and was therefore characterized by a certain degree of predictability.

Cherishing the Memory of the Tyrannical King and the Fearless Assasin © Li Liang

Chun’s art is different. Its quality lies in its diversity and authenticity, which in the present case indeed means that the artist gives room in his painterly cosmos to exterior influences and inspirations just as self-evidently as he does to his own ideas, dreams, and concepts. The unifying force is painting as such, which Chun pursues with great absoluteness and seriousness.

Grown up in Xi’an, far away from the capital of Beijing, he conquered painting for himself through the process of painting. It is not his unusual talent or his education at the Xi’an Art Academy that account for his art, but his boisterous resolution to find images for what he has to say. Motifs, imagery, and the use of media are subjected to this end, so that his pictures – regardless of their recognizable references to sources in art and reality – emanate a great amount of immediacy.

Gold Crown and Silver Crown (2006) © Li Liang

This paradox is partly responsible for the mixture of fascination and irritation that makes looking at Ouyang Chun’s art so stimulating and which becomes particularly manifest in his cycle King, which has been chosen for this exhibition. In adapting the Western language of painting, the artist has created new images for motifs rooted in the Chinese tradition in which the past and the present, East and West, and narration and abstraction are caused to merge.”

Ouyang Chun - Painting The King Exhibition view © Belvedere, Vienna

Ouyang Chun © me Collectors Room, Berlin, Photo: Achim Kleuker

Zhang Huan (B. 1965), Skin

Zhang Huan (B. 1965), Skin. photo courtesy Christie's Ltd 2011

signed, numbered and dated in Chinese and in English 'Zhang Huan 1997 18/25' (on a paper lable affixed to the reverse of each panel), colour coupler print, in twenty parts, each: 16 x 20in. (40.6 x 50.8cm.). Executed in 1997, this work is number eighteen from an edition of twenty-five. Estimate £25,000 - £35,000. Price Realized £49,250

Provenance: Friedman Benda Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Literature: Xunta de Galicia and Cotthen Gallery (ed.), Zhang Huan: A Pilgrim in Santiago, Santiago de Compostela, 2001 (illustration pp. 156 and 157).
Zhang Huan, exh. cat., Hamburg, Kunstverein, 2002-2003 (another from the edition illustrated, pp. 62-65).
Zhang Huan, exh. cat., Berlin, Galerie Volker Diehl, 2006 (another from the edition illustrated, pp. 8 and 9).

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction, 17 February 2011, London, King Street www.christies.com

Zhang Huan (B. 1965), Chicken Pox

Zhang Huan (B. 1965), Chicken Pox. photo courtesy Christie's Ltd 2011

signed, numbered and dated 'Zhang Huan 2000 21/25' (on a label affixed to the reverse of each panel), colour coupler prints, in six parts , 20 7/8 x 16½in. (53 x 42cm.). Executed in 2000, this work is number twenty-one from an edition of twenty-five. Estimate £5,000 - £7,000. Price Realized £6,250

Provenance: Max Lang Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Literature: Zhang Huan, exh. cat., Berlin, Galerie Volker Diehl, 2006 (another from the edition illustrated in colour, pp. 25-29).
Xunta de Galicia and Cotthen Gallery (ed.), Zhang Huan: A Pilgrim in Santiago, Santiago de Compostela 2001 (illustrated in colour, pp. 79-81).

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction, 17 February 2011, London, King Street www.christies.com