983 - Zeng Li, Court Fashion I, Chinese Avant-Garde Textile Collage, dated 1990

Zeng Li, Court Fashion I, Chinese Avant-Garde Textile Collage, dated 1990 Collage of textile and paint on canvas, the reverse inscribed on the canvas in Chinese handwriting with the title 宫庭时装 I, signed 曾力 and dated 1990.12. A tall oval composition formed from gold-colored brocade fragments with woven patterns and thickly applied paint in ochre, khaki, and grey-brown, featuring a shadowy figure in a central oval field with modeled folds. The surface is highly relief-like. Age-appropriate good condition. Image 75x60 cm (HxW), framed, the frame knocked, frame width 6.5 cm. The title 宫庭时装, pinyin gongting shizhuang, means courtly fashion or court dress; the writing 宫庭 is a handwritten variant of the standard 宫廷 for court and imperial palace. The work was made in December 1990, a good eighteen months after the exhibition China/Avant-Garde, which in February 1989 brought together experimental art since 1985 at the National Art Museum of China. The institutional framework for work with textile, fibre and material collage had been established at that time by the Bulgarian-French artist Maryn Varbanov, who came to Beijing in 1983 and in 1985 founded the tapestry institute at the art academy in Hangzhou; his students included Gu Wenda, Liang Shaoji and Shi Hui. An unusual work for collectors of contemporary Chinese art.