Voyage dans le temps (Journey into time) (Lot 239) shows a perfectly balanced geometrical composition imbued with cold tonalities and a dominance of light sky blue. The complex configuration leads the viewer into an imaginary world, where place and time merge into an absolute entity. The clashing and melting colours in the middle of the composition mirror this idea of a superior whole. Voyage dans le temps is a perfect transitional work, as we still detect figurative lines depicting a vase, leaving a greater place to the colour itself, before the artist yields to complete abstraction.

In the preface of the catalogue of 2014 Wang Yancheng's exhibition at Gallery Louis Carrae & Cie in Paris, Zhong Cheng underlines the ambivalence between the two modes of representation: 'Signs submerged within the abstract flow were sometimes overtly evocative of Chinese pottery. Perhaps, in Wang Yancheg's subconscious, their fragility reflected his attachment to the realm of the figurative: the dreaded shattering them while at the same time he craved to do so.'

Between abstraction and figuration, the work encompasses the artistic genesis of a painter discovering France and the Western world, which,