Chen Cheng-Po

CHEN CHENG-PO (CHEN CHENGBO, Chinese, 1895-1947) Lying Nude-32.1 (38) signed in Chinese; dated '1932.1.'; inscribed 'C.T.P.' in English (lower left) watercolour on paper 25.8 x 36 cm (10 1/8 x 14 1/8 in.) Painted in 1932 Private Collection, Asia Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Nostalgia in the Vast Universe, Commemorative Exhibition of Chen Cheng-Po, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2011 (illustrated, plate 197, p. 205). Artist Pulishing Co., Chen Cheng-Po Corpus Volume 3, Watercolor Sketch, Taipei, Taiwan, 2012 (illustrated, p. 163 & book spine).

Lot Description Cheng-Po Chen (1895-1947) Summer Morning signed in Chinese; dated '1940' (lower left); inscribed in Chinese; dated '1940' (side of the canvas) oil canvas 91 x 117 cm. (35 7/8 x 46 1/8 in.) 20th Century 1 Literature Hsiung-Shih Art Book, Taiwan Fine Arts Artists 2: Chen Cheng-Po: The Academic Painter , Taipei, Taiwan, 1979 (illustrated, p. 72). Artists Publishing Co., Taiwan Fine Arts Series 1: Chen Cheng Po, Taipei, Taiwan, 1992 (illustrated, p. 137). Hsiung-Shih Art Book, Paint, Enthusiasm: Chen Cheng Po, Taiwan, Taiwan, 1998 (illustrated, p. 105). Taiwan Soka Association, The Official Fine Arts Exhibition in Taiwan during the Japanese Occupation, 1927-1943 , Taipei, Taiwan, 2010 (illustrated, p. 178). Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Nostalgia in the Vast Universe: Commemorative Exhibition of Chen Cheng-Po , Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2011 (illustrated, plate 16, p. 63). Chiayi 228 Memorial Foundation, Chen Cheng-Pos Paintings, Chiaya, Taiwan, 2011 (illustrated, p. 208). Chin-Shuan Chultural & Educational Foundation, Under the Searing Sun: A Solo Exhibition by Chen Cheng-Po , Taipei, Taiwan, 2012 (illustrated, pp. 100-101). Liang Gallery Co., Ltd., The Origin of Taiwan Art: Chen Cheng-Po, Taipei, Taiwan, 2012 (illustrated, p. 201). Exhibited Taipei, Taiwan, Taiwan Education Association Building, The Third Taiwan Viceroy Art Exhibition , 1940. Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Nostalgia in the Vast Universe: Commemorative Exhibition of Chen Cheng-Po, 22 October 2011 - 28 February 2012. Taipei, Taiwan, Chin-Shuan Chultural & Educational Foundation, Under the Searing Sun V A Solo Exhibition by Chen Cheng-Po , 28 March - 16 June 2012. Taipei, Taiwan, Liang Gallery, The Land with Love: Taiwan Art Journey , 3 October - 13 December 2012 View Lot Notes > Chen Cheng-po was an important 20th century artist in the oil medium whose work shows links with Japan, Shanghai, and Taiwan. At the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in Japan, Chen learned to value the Eastern painting tradition. In Shanghai, after contact with painters who had studied in France, techniques and themes from the Eastern tradition began appearing in his Western-style oils, imbuing them with greater vitality and ultimately creating a style with a uniquely Taiwanese flavor. Chen's fine control of color, expressing his personal humanistic bent and an emphasis on Chinese ink-wash techniques, also reflected the bold use of color in Western art. These factors, added together, made Chen Cheng-po a unique and essential artist. Summer Morning (Lot 19) dates from the period after Chen completed his studies in Japan, had taught art in Shanghai, and then returned to live permanently in Taiwan. An important figure in Taiwan's art history, Chen Cheng-po frequently won honors at the island-wide Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibitions that were held under Japanese colonial rule. In the third Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition, the winning entry was this Summer Morning, due to Chen's superior handling of theme and subject and his use of color in the work. Much of the appeal of Summer Morning, in fact, derives from the way these elements are manifested throughout the work. One element of Chen Cheng-po's artistic vocabulary was the use of rounded, arcing compositional layouts, and these ovular compositions, which worked so well to set off his subjects, are seen in many of his works. Here, the banks of the pond form an oval that Chen sets in the middle of his pictorial space, while the surrounding scenery becomes part of the narrative Chen wants to convey. A father and his son link hands in visual counterpart to the rural village buildings, and by placing their backs to the viewer, the artist suggests that their story contains further untold elements. During the Renaissance, Botticelli similarly employed an oval composition in his famous The Birth of Venus (Fig. 1) to convey the interconnected relationships of the figures in the painting. Botticelli's oval helps create a narrative sequence of cause and effect, and at the same time, ingeniously produces symmetry in the work despite the unequal numbers of figures on each side. Van Gogh, in The Starry Night (Fig. 2), dazzles the viewer with a moonlight sky full of stars in whirling vortexes; this ability to successfully convey this dizzying feeling within his canvas was one element that attracted Chen Cheng-po to his work. In Chen's Summer Morning, the leaves of the distant trees cannot be seen in any detail; Chen depicts them in swirling swaths of dense greenery, which, like van Gogh's stars, convey a sense of beauty in the way the great masses of leaves congregate together. In traditional Eastern thought, the circle symbolically implies union and completeness, and Chen's oval composition here, combined with his father-and-son theme, speaks of fond thoughts for those dear to the artist and a desire for reunion. The loss of his mother when he was still very young meant that Chen had a lonely childhood, growing up dependent on his grandmother and leaving him with an intense desire for closer familial relationships-perhaps the reason why, in his paintings, we so often see images of parents and children together. Chen's father also left the family early on for life on his own, and the young artist seldom saw him. Though Chen infrequently displays father and son pairings in his work, that nevertheless becomes the central theme of this work, illustrating how rare a painting this Summer Morning was for Chen and highlighting all the more its value within his oeuvre. Aside from any technique, the basic ardor of Chen's personality, his romantic temperament, was such that he harbored special feelings all his life for the place he grew up. Hence his hometown of Chiayi and its surroundings appeared often as subject in his paintings. In this respect he very much resembled the British naturalist painters of the 18th century, who often depicted the environs surrounding their towns and cities. One such painter was Richard Wilson, whose View in Windsor Great Park (Fig. 3) presents a composition and a scene of a very similar vein. One difference, however, lies in the way Chen Cheng-po extends the meandering pathway that begins at the bottom left all the way to the far right, opening the composition out on the right to give viewers a broader sense of space. Chen's scene is set somewhere outside of Chiayi; a father and his son, wearing woven bamboo-leaf hats, have risen early on this summer morning. In summer, the morning is the time for hurrying to the fields to start on the day's work; rural life often means rising with the sun and returning when evening falls. The father leads his son by the hand as they rise with the sun to get an early start and avoid the mid-day summer heat, but the pleasant, genial warmth of the morning sunlight encourages them to linger by the waterside and view the scene, even as they raise their arms to shield their eyes from the coming brilliance of the sun. In Chen's vivid and lifelike depiction, the coolly rippling waters in the center of the composition add an extra touch of summertime ambience.

CHEN CHENG-PO (CHEN CHENGBO, Chinese, 1895-1947) At Leisure below the Pagoda Hill signed and dated in Chinese (lower left); signed, titled and dated in Chinese (side of canvas) oil on canvas 41 x 32 cm. (16 1/8 x 12 5/8 in.) Painted in 1933 Private Collection, Asia Soka Association, Under the Searing Sun: A Solo Exhibition by Chen Cheng-Po, Taipei, Taiwan, 2012 (illustrated, p. 67). Taipei, Taiwan, Soka Association, Under the Searing Sun: A Solo Exhibition by Chen Cheng-Po, 28 March -16 June 2012. Chen cheng-po's paintings embody the essence of Eastern and Western art; they also reflect his passion, honest and sensitive characteristics. His broad vision and sharp observation brought him under the spotlight in the Chinese modern painting world. Born in 1895, Chen devoted his entire life to his country, his hometown, his family, and art creation. He studied under a Japanese art teacher Kinichiro Ishikawa since he was very young. He first practiced sketching in Taiwan, and moved to Tokyo to study Western painting. Later, he moved to Shanghai and developed a style in which "East-meets-West". During his stay in Shanghai, both Chinese literati ink-wash tradition and Western paintings inserted huge influences on him. Shanghai in the early 20th century was politically very unstable. Such a condition attracted many Chinese artists who were deeply influenced by Western modern art theories. As soon as Chen was graduated from the Western Painting Department in Tokyo School of Arts, he went to Shanghai to teach art in 1929. Chen was a member of Juelan, the Storm Art Society, from 1931 to 1932, and befriended many artists like Pan Yu-liang and Wang Ji-yuan. Through these artists, Chen gained much exposure to Western style of painting especially the School of Paris. Chen's experiences in Shanghai were instrumental to his artistic development. He once said that he was very much indebted to two Chinese ink painting masters, Bada Shanren and Ni Zan, from whom he absorbed the use of lines and dry brush. Bada Shanren and Ni Zan are leading figures in traditional Chinese ink-wash paintings, they mastered in capturing the unfathomable mood and ambience and transforming it into a visual language. Forms and shapes are not the main concern of the artists in their creations but instead the "a sense of atmosphere". Chen employed such concept in his sketches and life drawings in oil paint. Chen's four works in the sale were all created during his stay in Shanghai. The oil paintings of traditional Chinese landscapes, while painted by the artist with Western techniques, exude a kind of literati temperament. The sketches made between 1931 and 1932 also bear lines and dry brushstrokes that Chen learned from his predecessors. At Leisure below the Pagoda Hill (Lot 150) is a 1933 work made before Chen Cheng-po moved back to Taiwan from Shanghai. Towers at the peak of mountains are often seen in many of Chen's sketches, projecting the artist's careful thoughts to make this final painting. From the composition of the sketch (Fig. 1), one can see similarities between the sketch and the painting, including the positions of the cottages beneath the tower and those at the mountainside. On the left hand side of the sketch, it's inscribed as "the fifth journey to Mount Hui, 1931.8.13". This may imply that this oil painting was created by Chen during his visit to Mount Hui in Wuxi, Jiangsu as an expression of his feelings towards the marvelous scenery. The S-shaped composition in this painting was inspired by his teacher, Kinichiro Ishikawa. It directs viewers' attention to the tower far away on the mountain top. Two paths converge into one running up the hill. The climbers create an upward dynamic that leads the gaze of the viewers to the tower. The woman holding a baby in the front catches viewers' eye at first sight. In Shanghai, Chen started to explore the techniques of traditional Chinese ink-wash paintings. He came to grasp the methodology of Bada Shanren and Ni Zan to derive an intuitive feeling from subjective observation. By investigating and practicing free style, hence creating free style paintings. In the picture, Chen delineated branches and leaves with sweeping strokes, trees came to life with the breeze stirring the leaves. The motion of the climbers is further enhanced by the Fauvist-like red colour. The baby in the mother's arms is coloured in a lighter green, in contrast with the dark green in the background, he looks secluded and quiet. At Leisure below the Pagoda Hill is one of Chen's masterpieces painted in his late years in Shanghai, it is a great work that internalises Chen Cheng-po's endless effort in bringing the East and West painting techniques together.

CHEN Cheng-po (Taiwanese, 1895-1947) PrintTai Lake 1934 Oil on canvas 38 x 45.5 cm Signed lower right Cheng-po and dated 1934 in Chinese Inquiry: Taipei Stella Huang +886 2 2708 9868 Hong Kong Elaine Holt +852 2889 0859 The signature "Cheng-po" in the lower right and the inscription "34" suggest that this untitled painting was made by Chen Cheng-po in 1934. The lake and mountain scenery are reminiscent of two of Chen's oil paintings, namely the 1929 "Tai Lake Villas" and the 1931 "Wuli Lake." We can therefore assume that the landscapes depicted in Chen's paintings are around Tai Lake in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. Located to the southwest of Wuxi, Wuli Lake is shaped like a bottle gourd and is an inland lake that extends from Tai Lake. Legends speak of the statesman Fan Li and the beautiful Hsi Shih rowing on the lake during the Spring and Autumn Period, and subsequent generations called Wuli Lake "Li Lake" in memory of Fan Li. Chen, whose father had been a scholar in the Qing imperial civil service, was born in 1895 and received an education in Chinese literature and the traditional arts during his formative years. In 1913 at the age of 18, he began receiving instruction from the Japanese watercolor painter Kinichiro Ishikawa, which gave him his initial exposure to Western art. He gained admission to the normal division of Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1924. Although he encountered modernity via his contemporary Japanese education, his cultural roots and lifestyle were inherited from traditional Chinese culture. Taiwanese intellectuals in the early 20th century retained a yearning for China, and Chen visited Shanghai and Hangzhou for the first time in 1928. Afterwards, he entered works in the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition and other art exhibitions depicting southern Chinese scenery. For instance, many of his paintings from this period feature the Qiantang River, Suzhou, Mt. Putuo, West Lake, and Shanghai. His 1928 "Early Spring" and 1931 "Spring Scenery at West Lake," both of which portray the scenery around West Lake, were finalists at Japan's Imperial Exhibition. After graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1929, Chen moved to Shanghai at the invitation of Chinese painter Wang Qiyuan in order to further his career as a professional artist. There, Chen taught at the Xinhua College of Art, a private school, while concurrently teaching at Changming College of Art and the Yiyuan Painting Academy. Not long after arriving in Shanghai, he was invited to serve as a reviewer for the "1st National Fine Art Exhibition." His oils "Stream," portraying West Lake scenery, and "Suzhou," portraying a Suzhou scene, were both entered in this exhibition, "Stream" was exhibited at the 1931 Chicago Exposition as a representative work of China. It is clear that Chen Cheng-po was already infatuated with the scenery of southern China. After five years of teaching and painting in Shanghai, the outsider Chen Cheng-po had carved out a niche for himself in the Shanghai painting community. His work was inspired by that of the Yuan Dynasty painter Ni Yunlin (1306-1374) and the Qing Dynasty painter Bada Shanren (Chu Ta, 1624/1626-1705), and combined the expressive lines of Chinese painting with Western realistic styling. His oil paintings from around 1930 incorporate age-old Eastern notions of refined taste. When the January 28 Incident broke out in 1932 between Chinese and Japanese forces, Chen first sent his family to Taiwan, and himself returned to Taiwan in 1933 after observing the situation for another year. Chen did not forget the southern Chinese landscape after his return to Taiwan. Relying on sketches or memory, during 1934 he painted such appealing works as "Spring Scenery at West Lake," "Distant View of West Lake," and "Boating on West Lake." The current oil painting "Tai Lake" was made under similar circumstances. "Tai Lake" depicts the landscape in the Tai Lake basin, and its composition resembles those of the aforementioned "Tai Lake Villas" and "Wuli Lake." The shore and hills in "Tai Lake" are in accord with the traditional "zig-zag" principle of composition, and the painting as a whole is uncluttered, powerful, and full of bold, rough-hewn expressiveness. The luxuriant trees are portrayed using exaggerated circular strokes, and the brushwork is evocative free-flowing strokes made with a Chinese writing brush. As a result, the painting contains a vibrant sense of energy and movement. "Tai Lake" is also characterized by a palpable post-impressionist style. The hillsides have clearly-defined colors and are rich in vitality. The branches of the trees in the near scenery are sketched in dark green, and the thick oils highlights nature's rich color scale - the lake waters below provide an interesting reflection of the bright blue sky, and the work as a whole displays the artist's enthusiastic and hearty personality. The painting thus encapsulates the beauty of southern China's lake country during the 1930s.

Lot Description CHEN CHENG-PO (CHEN CHENGBO, Chinese, 1895-1947) Nude dated in Chinese (lower right) oil on canvas 72 x 52.5 cm. (28 3/8 x 20 5/8 in.) Painted in 1928 Provenance Private Collection, Asia Literature Art Center of Cheng-Shiu University, From Nationality to Land: Seminar on Cultural Reflection in Chen Cheng-po's Art, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2011 (illustrated, p. 13). View Lot Notes › When a medley of Chen Cheng-Po's still life and nude paintings are introduced to us for the first time - as with the 2011 exhibition Nostalgia in the Vast Universe: Commemorative Exhibition of Chen Cheng-Po and the 2012 Journey Through Jiangnan: A Pivotal Moment in Chen Cheng-Po's Artistic Quest, held respectively at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum - we can enjoy, at last, a full picture of the artist's creative enterprise, expanding upon and enriching what we already know about his landscapes. Shiotsuki Toho, the curator of the Taiwan exhibitions, commended that Chen is "assuredly practiced at sketching", a remark that fits with the few nudes he created. Chen entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (the former Tokyo University of the Arts) to study western paintings in 1927; in 1928 he moved around Taiwan, Japan and China, getting down to his productions and holding solo exhibitions. Those were the years when, little by little, he began to garner recognition and a reputation in the art world. The following year he started teaching in Shanghai at the invitation of Wang Jiyuan. This evening sale features Nude (Lot 2016), a work produced between the Tokyo and Shanghai periods of the artist, which is also the very first nude painting of Chen to appear at public auction. It exhibits his transformation of style in both coloring and spatial arrangement, and so epitomizes the way he breaks through the academic fence and breathes an idiosyncratic style into his work. The instructors of the Tokyo Art School, including Kuroda Seiki, Kume Keiichiro, Fujishima Takeji, and Okada Saburosuke, were leading figures in early 20th-Century Japanese art. While plein air painting, a branch of Impressionism especially concerned with outdoor light and air, had been introduced into Japan, in other respects Japanese art was still largely under the sway of European schools of naturalism and realism. Nude, too, is fundamentally naturalistic and realistic, displaying a classicism in both palette and composition; that said, the formal elements Chen used are wholly original, reflective of his unwonted line of thoughts. A warm color tone is deployed to visualize the fleshiness and volume of the female body, while the shadow shades on her skin, the background and the seat cushion are deposited with a green tone. Supplementing each other, the juxtaposing green and red invoke stimulation to the eyes, but their brightness and chromaticity are so shrewdly manipulated that they never look discordant but all the more collaborative. The reddish oranges of the body and the floor give layers to the interior space, and the blend of pale green and brownish red creates a penetrating sense of latitude. Chen's preference of coloring as shown in the work is already loaded with a remarkable individual style; the use of brick red and green, in particular, will become his archetypes, most illustratable in his works of the 1930s like Spring at Mount Ali and Hill (Tamkang High School) . Human figure study has been an important element in the basic training of artists ever since the Renaissance, and while the subject of the female nude is a common one in Western art, it nevertheless displays an artist's ability to observe in detail as well as control the overall composition. Matisse once observed, "What interests me most is neither still-life nor landscape, but the human figure. Through it I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life." In Nude the woman rests on the right of the canvas, her body slightly slanting towards the left, her gaze traveling to the bottom left. A straight, brownish red strip marks the left edge of the composition, creating a line of division with its darker and rigid tone. This vertical line also reveals the visual flow of this work, which moves round from the corner of the red strip to the woman's tiptoe, then to her leg, the curvature of her body, and back to the red strip. The work, moreover, parts with the formalized interior composition of spatial extension common to nude drawings: the background, primarily pastel green, should have projected a wall corner corresponded to the angle on the floor, beside which the chair stands. Such irrational perspective demonstrates how the artist arranges and represents space according to his own compositional motif rather than following the traditional, realistic reproduction of three-dimensional structure. The distortion and deformation of space also forecast his orientation towards cavalier perspective in reconstructing the spaces of his landscapes. Nude, therefore, exemplifies the way Chen Cheng-Po explores subjectivity and spirituality within the larger framework of realism by crossing the frontier of traditional painting, and hence testifies to his stylistic evolution over a course of artistic experiment.