January 2025 : The highlights of the
month !
January saw the launch of the 70th Brafa Art Fair, a wonderful occasion to present a fine selection of modern and contemporary Asian art with Galerie Hioco, Galerie Jean-François Cazeau and Galerie Taménaga.
Focus also on Tang art, with a rare marble sculpture currently on display at W.Shanshan gallery.
W. SHANSHAN 珊然軒, London
Founded in 2020, W. SHANSHAN has a unique focus on rare Asian art works from the Neolithic period to the 10 th century. Specialising in ceramics, bronzes, and stone sculptures, the gallery regularly curates special exhibitions in London and Paris, showcasing a deep cultural exchange by combining highly aesthetic European artworks with their Asian counterparts. W. SHANSHAN also performs as a platform providing public lectures, handling sessions and other cultural events.
The founder of the gallery Dr. Shanshan Wang was born and raised in the heart of cultured Beijing. She has spent the last two decades living in France, Germany and the UK. With a Ph.D. in Chemistry, Shanshan continues to explore the common feature between science and art – creativity. She is an artist with many years of experience in both traditional Chinese paintings and Western art forms. Over the years, she has spent an immense amount of time travelling around the world and visiting major museums and archaeological sites. 25 years’ practice in antique dealing alongside an experienced dealer has equipped her with unique connoisseurship and expertise in spotting ancient artworks at elevated level in quality and aesthetics. Shanshan is generous with her cross-cultural knowledge and spends considerable effort in sharing her knowledge with the public.
MARBLE BUDDHIST GUARDIAN
Tang dynasty (618 - 907 CE)
34.5 cm high
This rare marble guardian sculpture from the Tang dynasty is usually called 金剛力士which originates from the Indian Buddhist deity Vajrapani. He is a guardian that stands next to the buddhas and bodhisattvas as a protector in ritual sites such as temples and grottos.
The marble sculpture was made using a realism approach, consistent with the terracotta tomb figures produced during the same period. The guardian has a wrathful and a fierce facial expression, intent on threatening evils. The exposed breast reveals dense chest muscles, and the exaggeratedly large feet stand firmly on the rock. The missing arms lead us to imagine him holding weapons or displaying fists, demonstrating his godly power. The posture is Hellenistic with the figure’s weight held slightly on the left side of the body. Therefore, this figure can be named ‘Chinese Venus’ because of his missing arms. This kind of esoteric sculpture evolved in China with the arrival of tantric beliefs in the 8th century but suffered from severe losses due to the anti-Buddhist repression in 840-846 CE. Other examples of this guardian, called Nio, can be found in the popular post Tang-era statuary of Japan.
Provenance: An American collection
Reference: There has not been any know public record of the same kind.
However, the similar form can be seen at various Buddhism grotto sites, such as Fengxian Temple at Longmen.
Find out more : Marble Buddhist Guardian | W. Shanshan 珊然軒
Asian Art fully present at BRAFA Art Fair !
January 26 to February 2, 2025
BRAFA is getting ready to unveil its 70th instalment. This anniversary edition promises to be a milestone, celebrating seven decades of quality, excellence and eclecticism.
From Sunday, January 26th to Sunday, February 2nd, 2025, the Fair will be welcoming 130 exhibitors from 16 countries to Brussels Expo (Halls 3 and 4), consolidating its international scope. 16 new galleries will also be joining the various sections. Each year, BRAFA seeks to offer an exceptional panorama of art history in a convivial atmosphere enhanced by a sumptuous setting, which is eagerly anticipated by numerous visitors.
Discover a fine selection of modern and contemporary Asian art represented by Galerie Hioco, Galerie Jean-François Cazeau, Galerie Taménaga.
CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE CERAMICS
Stand n°39, Hioco gallery
Kaneta Masanao – Untitled
Kaneta Masanao, born in 1953
Glazed stoneware
Rock-like vase with multy plane body, Scooped-out vessel with Hagi and ash glazes with greys, pink coloration and extensive kiln effects
2018
H. 31 x 30 x 39,5 cm
Born in 1953, Kaneta Masanao is one of the most recognized ceramists on the contemporary Japanese scene. An eighth-generation potter from the city of Hagi, known for its traditional skills (hagi-yaki is a form of pottery whose origins date back to the 17th century), he uses these ancestral techniques to create unique functional and non-functional contemporary ceramic forms.
He also uses the kurinuki technique of carving a form into clay instead of wheel forming, which allows him to boldly depart from ancient Hagi traditions.
His work evokes a distinct tension between function and form, technique and tradition.
He has been exhibited countless times nationally and internationally. These include the 400-year retrospective of Hagi at the Suntory Museum, a large group exhibition at the Ibaraki Prefectural Museum of Ceramic Art, and the Nihon Dento Kogei Ten exhibition.
He is also in many museum collections: the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum, the Museum of Modern Ceramics in Gifu, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Art in Philadelphia, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
BRAFA 2025 - Hioco gallery © Emmanuel Crooÿ
ANDRÉ MASSON
Stand n°41, Jean-François Cazeau gallery
André Masson (Balagny-sur-Thérain 1896-1987 Paris)
Fête, 1956
Oil on canvas
90 x 81 cm
Signed lower left “André Masson”
Confronted with the outbreak of war in Europe and the Vichy government, Masson escaped to the United States in 1940. Despite the upheavals of the war, the 1940s and 1950s represented a fertile period in the artist's work, which returned to the great themes that fascinated him - the sign and instinct.
After the complex intertwining forms of his Sables of the 1940s, "Fête" represents the artist's full plunge into the question of the pictographic sign. Around 1955 Masson began a new series of characters and signs: calligraphic forms that seemed to dance on monochrome backgrounds.The simplicity of the writing of La Fête, combined with the pictographic, sometimes even anthropomorphic character of its signs, recalls the divinatory inscriptions, thousands of years old, of Chinese Oracle Bone Script . For Masson, an artist always interested in the flow of energy that animates the world, the work would take on the same magical and incantatory role.
In a text entitled "A painting of the essential", Masson expresses himself on the influence that painting and Far Eastern thought have on him, in particular the freedom of the gesture in an infinite space and the vital, elementary forces of the Zen philosophy of the Liezi. If the pictogram is one of the great preoccupations of the avant-garde movements, in the utopian quest for a universal language, what Masson does in his works is a more subjective and free translation of the underlying forces of nature. This philosophy is accentuated by the artist's touch, thick with impasto in a vortex of pictural matter. His forms thus seem to dance on the incendiary red background.
An artist in constant transformation, Masson's surrealist automatic drawings fully metamorphise here into the pictographic, vitalist sign.
Provenance: the artist’s studio; Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, 1956; Galerie Beyeler, Basel; Galerie Cleto Polcina, Rome; private collection, Paris (since 1996)
Literature: André Masson, une mythologie de l’être et de la nature, éd. Silvana, Musée d’art moderne de Céret, 22 June-27 October 2019, p 197; André Masson, 29 January-19 April 2004, Musée National de la Reina Sofia, éd Armero, Madrid, 2004, p 250
Exhibitions: XXIX Exposition biennale internationale des Beaux-Arts, Venice, 1958; 5th International Art Exhibition, Japan, 1959; Madrid, André Masson, Armero Ediciones, Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 29 January-19 April 2004, cat. n° 250.
Further information:
Stand n°41 - BRAFA Art Fair | Jean-François Cazeau gallery
CHEN JIAN-HONG
Stand n°87, Taménaga gallery
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Chen Jiang-Hong (China, Tianjin 1963)
Untitled, 2024
Oil on canvas
130 x 162 cm
Provenance: the artist's studio
Chen Jiang-Hong was born in 1963 in Tianjin, a large city in northern China. He first studied at the Tianjin School of Fine Arts before entering the highly selective Beijing School of Fine Arts. At the end of his studies, he decided to discover the world and foreign cultures. He was admitted to the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1987. In 1989, while still a student at the Beaux-Arts, the young artist had his first solo exhibition in a Parisian gallery, where he was noticed by the critics. Chen Jiang-Hong’s career was then launched.
Chen’s work soon reflected his career path, halfway between the two worlds in which he grew up. Moving away from the traditional Asian supports of silk or paper, influenced by the Western heritage, the artist chooses to paint on canvas: either with ink, when it is a raw canvas, or with oil, when it is a coated canvas. The oil, diluted with turpentine, takes on the fluidity of the ink and can be worked to transparency. However, the use of long wolf-hair brushes irrevocably brings Chen Jiang-Hong’s art back into the fold of the Chinese calligraphic tradition. With the particularity of serving as a medium reservoir, they allow the artist to cover a vast surface in a single gesture, that gesture so primordial in the painter’s work.
Belonging to Xieyi painting, literally meaning “writing the idea”, Chen’s art is closely linked to breathing, breath and meditation. The artist lays the canvas flat on the floor of his studio, then applies the soaked brush to the blank surface and, with his whole body driven by his momentum, performs an exalted choreography; the motif then appears on the canvas.
Although he initially worked in a figurative style to which he was able to give an extraordinary dynamic, in recent years the painter has turned to a vibrant abstraction with an explosive lyricism.
Further information :
Stand n°87- BRAFA Art Fair | Taménaga gallery
Find out more :
📍BRAFA Art Fair – Brussels Expo (Hall 3 & 4)
Place de Belgique / Belgiëplein 1
1020 Brussels - Belgium