Jun Tian Fang music studio holds event to promote Chinese music
very rare handwritten poem by Jewish diarist Anne Frank was sold for 140,000 euros ($ 147,455) to an unnamed online bidder Wednesday, fetching almost three times its reserve price.
Auctioneers closed the sale after just two minutes of tense bidding at the Bubb Kuyper auction house in the western Dutch city of Haarlem.
Around 20 collectors took their seats in a sales room decorated with antique books, maps and illustrations while others bid by telephone and online.
The reserve price was set at 30,000 euros.
“Over the last 40 years, only four or five documents signed by the teenager have gone under the ham- mer,” Bubb Kuyper co- director Thys Blankevoort said.
“I am pleasantly surprised. I wasn’t expecting 140,000,” he told AFP after the sale.
“It indicates the emotion with which people buy [ these pieces] and the symbol that Anne Frank was,” he said.
Dedicated to “Dear Cri- cri,” the poem, written in Dutch in black ink on a notebook- size piece of white paper which has slightly discolored with age, is signed “in memory, from Anne Frank.” As part of its Guqin Studio and Workshop Campus Tour, the Jun Tian Fang studio has been holding a series of activities at the Beijing Foreign Studies University to promote the art of the Chinese stringed instrument known as the guqin among university students.
Ending on Friday, the week- long event has included exhibitions, lectures, poetry readings and guqin concerts.
Founded in 2001 by Wang Peng, a music producer and guqin player, Jun Tian Fang is one of the largest guqin music studios in the world. For more than a decade it has been dedicated to music education and the promotion and organization of guqin concerts.
“With more and more people, especially young people, regaining interest in this ancient music instrument, I feel it is time to promote it in a wider range and at an earlier phase in people’s lives, such as their time at university,” Wang said in a press release sent to Global Times.
On Friday night, Wang and six musicians will present an avant- garde concert, which will involve guqin and Tai Chi into one performance.