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Lot Essay
This work was on loan to and exhibited at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City between 2013 and 2015.
Microcosm-Macrocosm is Tai Xiangzhou’s tribute to Fishermen, the renowned handscroll by Northern Song painter Xu Daoning. From the inscription, Tai told the story that inspired him to create this work: once in New York visiting a collector friend, he saw a scholar’s rock and fell in love with it immediately. The rock reminded him of the peculiar shapes of the mountains in the Northern Song handscroll, thus Tai painted three views of the rock and used them to form his own version of Fishermen. By not painting any vegetation and figure in his work, Tai accentuated the relationship between the scholar’s rock and the mountain formation and added to it a notion of the surreal and timelessness. The title of the work, Microcosm-Macrocosm, suggests how the artist sees the larger universe through a small object by close observation and imagination, and in this case a small scholar’s rock.
Born in Yinchuan in 1968, Tai Xiangzhou is a scholar as well as a painter. He studied under calligrapher Hu Gongshi and scholar Feng Qiyong, later acquired his doctorate degree from Tsinghua University. Tai strives to reconstruct the model configuration of early Chinese landscape paintings and has conducted ample research on the origin and evolution of landscape compositions from ancient times. Tai’s works have been exhibited in many important museums and galleries in the United States, and collected by institutions such as Harvard University, Yale University, and Princeton University.
Microcosm-Macrocosm is Tai Xiangzhou’s tribute to Fishermen, the renowned handscroll by Northern Song painter Xu Daoning. From the inscription, Tai told the story that inspired him to create this work: once in New York visiting a collector friend, he saw a scholar’s rock and fell in love with it immediately. The rock reminded him of the peculiar shapes of the mountains in the Northern Song handscroll, thus Tai painted three views of the rock and used them to form his own version of Fishermen. By not painting any vegetation and figure in his work, Tai accentuated the relationship between the scholar’s rock and the mountain formation and added to it a notion of the surreal and timelessness. The title of the work, Microcosm-Macrocosm, suggests how the artist sees the larger universe through a small object by close observation and imagination, and in this case a small scholar’s rock.
Born in Yinchuan in 1968, Tai Xiangzhou is a scholar as well as a painter. He studied under calligrapher Hu Gongshi and scholar Feng Qiyong, later acquired his doctorate degree from Tsinghua University. Tai strives to reconstruct the model configuration of early Chinese landscape paintings and has conducted ample research on the origin and evolution of landscape compositions from ancient times. Tai’s works have been exhibited in many important museums and galleries in the United States, and collected by institutions such as Harvard University, Yale University, and Princeton University.