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Lot Essay
During his 26 years of military service, Yu Chengyao traveled throughout China's 18 provinces, taking in the grandeur of its natural scenery. Yu's lifelong practice of distilling the essence of a scene into a poem helped refine the powers of observation and selection so crucial to an artist, such that at the age of 56, when he decided to take up painting, he emerged as artist more evolved than his years of practice might imply. With one slow, careful stroke after another, he began to paint the landscapes of his memory and inner vision.
The winding river in Magnificent Landscape (Lot 2151) which separates the towering mountains on the left and right and the gigantic rocks in the mountains cause ingenious effects in texture. Yu devotes close attention to structure in the layered folds of the mountains, emphasizing as always the need to create "a sense of real physical presence." Just as in the painting Travelers Among Mountains and Streams by the Northern Song Dynasty painter Fan Kuan, Yu's approach here is one in which the massiveness of the mountains is projected with great impact through the subjective feeling and personal style of the artist. Traditional Chinese landscape paintings emphasize the co-existence of both virtual and real feelings and scenes. Yu Chengyao uses dense and short lines to create inextricable variation of uneven grains and rocks. Although thick and solid segmented pieces and layers of paints give weight to the painting, the running water and the blank space in the sky eliminate any closed and pressing feelings.
With the rise of Abstractionism in the early 20th Century, the formal elements of lines, dots, and planes were liberated from the bounds of naturalistic representation and received attention in their own right. Yu Chengyao also, after years of close observation of nature, developed a similarly modern vocabulary of form. In Magnificent Landscape , the layering and condensation of coloured dots and ink lines produce solid geometric forms in the segmented composition. Rounded trees, conical and cylindrical rocks and crags strengthen the connection among elements in the segmentation of space and composition, revealing the arrangements of objects in height, distance and depth.
Magnificent Landscape is formerly the property from Professor Sheung Chung Ho, the former Chairman of Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Hong Kong Chinese University. Professor Sheung is a renowned scholar and collector of Chinese painting and calligraphy.
The winding river in Magnificent Landscape (Lot 2151) which separates the towering mountains on the left and right and the gigantic rocks in the mountains cause ingenious effects in texture. Yu devotes close attention to structure in the layered folds of the mountains, emphasizing as always the need to create "a sense of real physical presence." Just as in the painting Travelers Among Mountains and Streams by the Northern Song Dynasty painter Fan Kuan, Yu's approach here is one in which the massiveness of the mountains is projected with great impact through the subjective feeling and personal style of the artist. Traditional Chinese landscape paintings emphasize the co-existence of both virtual and real feelings and scenes. Yu Chengyao uses dense and short lines to create inextricable variation of uneven grains and rocks. Although thick and solid segmented pieces and layers of paints give weight to the painting, the running water and the blank space in the sky eliminate any closed and pressing feelings.
With the rise of Abstractionism in the early 20th Century, the formal elements of lines, dots, and planes were liberated from the bounds of naturalistic representation and received attention in their own right. Yu Chengyao also, after years of close observation of nature, developed a similarly modern vocabulary of form. In Magnificent Landscape , the layering and condensation of coloured dots and ink lines produce solid geometric forms in the segmented composition. Rounded trees, conical and cylindrical rocks and crags strengthen the connection among elements in the segmentation of space and composition, revealing the arrangements of objects in height, distance and depth.
Magnificent Landscape is formerly the property from Professor Sheung Chung Ho, the former Chairman of Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Hong Kong Chinese University. Professor Sheung is a renowned scholar and collector of Chinese painting and calligraphy.