New Frontiers
SANYU
hen Sichuan-born artist Sanyu passed away in his Paris apartment in 1966, the victim of a gas leak, he was poor, alone and virtually unknown. Now, he’s hailed as the Chinese Matisse, famous for blurring the boundaries of Chinese and western art by painting female nudes—a subject forbidden in China at the time—in a style inspired by traditional Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting. Sanyu first moved to the French capital in 1921, when he was 20 years old. His early years in Europe sold for HK$303 million at Christie’s in Hong Kong—a record for the artist.
