Chinese scroll could sell for record amount
An extremely rare, 11th-century Chinese scroll could set an auction price record for an Asian artwork when it goes on the block at Christie’s November Hong Kong sale.
Estimated in excess of $51 million, the work is one of only two known scrolls produced by Song dynasty artist Su Shi, and the first to ever appear at auction, Christie’s said. The other resides in the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.
“This is simply the best Chinese painting you could possibly get,” said Jonathan Stone, co-chairman of Christie’s Asian Art department, who likened the piece’s significance and rarity to that of Salvator Mundi by Leonardo Da Vinci.
“In the purely market sense, there is comparability.”
Su Shi, a household name in China, was an 11th-century scholar, statesman, poet, writer, calligrapher and artist whose painting style has influenced virtually every Chinese painter ever since, according to Kim Yu, Christie’s international senior specialist of Chinese paintings.
He began an “aesthetic revolution” that departed from the highly detailed and meticulous academic Song dynasty works, which required months to complete. Su Shi’s Wood and Rock is a simple and spontaneous work created for the artist’s personal pleasure and painted in one sitting, Yu said.
Measuring nearly 28 centimetres high, and almost 51 centimetres wide, the original ink-onpaper work depicts a gnarled, leafless tree and a rock behind from which a few young bamboo shoots emerge.
Between the 11th and 16th centuries, four colophons, or commentaries by famous calligraphers, were added to the scroll, which now is more than two metres long. The scroll also contains 41 collector’s seals that provide an unimpeachable record of its ownership provenance.
Like Da Vinci, Su Shi was a “renaissance man” long before the Western concept came into existence several centuries later, Stone said.
“I like to think of Leonardo as a Western Su Shi, rather than Su Shi as a Chinese Leonardo. We shouldn’t look at things through an Atlantic lens,” he said.